by Eric Brown
He’d visited dozens of varied sites, fighting wars on Beta Hydri IV, sightseeing in ancient Greece, climbing Everest with Hillary and Tenzing...
Then, that morning, he’d come across something even more interesting. Moving back through the obsidian depths towards the basal rent in this site, he had noticed a golden light brighter than all the others. It was situated at the centre of all the tiny flecks of lights, like the sun-packed core of a galactic cluster. Out of curiosity he had diverted and made his way towards the light, almost blinded by its intensity as he made the transition to its interior.
It was not a virtual reality site, as such, but the vast core of the Mantoni Entertainments network. Lew had described the core to him when he had shown Barney around the Mantoni headquarters, shortly after he’d volunteered to help Lew recreate Estelle in VR. He’d indicated a chamber like a bank vault packed with more computer processing power than had ever before been assembled anywhere on Earth. The room was surrounded by armed guards and an array of sophisticated surveillance equipment.
Now Barney was in the unique and privileged position of finding himself inside the very mind, as it were, of the core.
The virtual engine room of the Mantoni cyberverse appeared to him as a network of interrelated skeins and vectors linking all the thousands of scattered sites. Visually it resembled a more tightly packed version of the galactic-analogue outside. He moved from light to light, expecting to find individual sites. What he discovered instead were mysterious realms which presented themselves to him in images of visual symbols: one light bombarded him with a thousand calculations, like a confetti of digits and mathematical code. Another site came to him in a welter of colours, each one of which corresponded to an emotion: the red of rage, the blue of intense grief, the orange of joy. The effect on him, after so long without feeling such things for himself, made him thankful that he was no longer prey to such irrational influences.
These sites made no real sense to him: he guessed that whatever they were in the cyberverse was beyond the conceptualisation of the human mind; his consciousness processed what he saw and interpreted it in symbols of what it understood, much as an animal might view the human world.
And then he found a site that did make sense to him, and more: it was a site he knew he would come back to, given the opportunity.
It was simply a long, low, white-walled room, containing a table and perhaps twenty men and women seated around it.
Lew Kramer was present, listening to a grey-haired man talk about productivity and development targets.
He had happened upon the Mantoni VR conferencing centre.
He listened in for an hour. They seemed to be worried about a group calling itself the Methuselah Project, though who these people were and what threat they represented to the Mantoni organisation, Barney was unsure. The people around the table were discussing the means by which they might find out more about the Project.
He was about to leave when the grey-haired man turned to Lew Kramer. ‘And how’s the e-identity download progressing, Lew?’
‘The NCI and the donor somaform are ready and waiting, sir. We’ll be initiating the download procedure this afternoon.’
‘No snags? Everything going down smooth?’
‘Everything’s AOK, sir.’
‘Very good. Keep me informed ...’
Barney would have smiled to himself, had he had the means to do so. He wondered if, once back out in the real world, Lew would allow him the use of a jellytank. The opportunity to eavesdrop on such conferences was too good to miss.
Now he stood on the wet sand and stared out to sea, waiting for the download procedure to begin. He wondered if the transition would be instantaneous: one second he would be standing here in paradise, and the next inhabiting the NCI in the head of an animated corpse. He wondered how long the rehabilitation might take, if he would have to suffer weeks or months of physical pain as he learned to control the donor body.
He wished the bastards would just leave him alone to roam the cyberverse. But what choice did he have in the matter? He was, after all, their property now.
‘Barney, good to see you again!’
Lew Kramer had materialised five metres up the beach, waving.
‘Lew, when’s the great switcheroo scheduled to take place?’
‘That’s why I’m here, Barney. We’re initiating the procedure in about fifteen minutes. I thought I’d better come and give you advance warning. Thought you might want to say goodbye ...’ He gestured towards the villa.
‘Thanks,’ he said. But no thanks, he thought.
He looked up the beach, avoiding eye contact with Kramer. ‘You know, in a way I’ll be sorry to leave this place. I’ll be able to come back, won’t I?’
Lew nodded. ‘You’ll have your own tank, Barney. I’ll see to that.’
Barney looked at the exec. ‘How much freedom will I have, Lew? I mean, will I be allowed out without a chaperone?’
Lew shrugged uneasily. ‘I don’t know quite how we stand on that one, Barney. But I can assure you that you’ll be well looked after. You’ll want for nothing.’
‘But I’ll still be a prisoner, right? After all, I’m the property of the Mantoni organisation now, aren’t I?’
Lew eyed him. ‘Look at it this way, Barney. If we hadn’t copied you back then, you wouldn’t be here. You’d be dead—’
‘Correction, Lew,’ Barney interrupted. ‘I wouldn’t be dead. The real Barney Kluger is the poor schmuck who’s dead. I’m just his copy, remember?’
‘The fact remains - thanks to the Mantoni organisation, you exist to experience all this.’
Barney shook his head. He tried to look into himself and determine how he felt about that. Would he rather not exist, or did he gain something from the experience of being - what could he call it? - of being e-live?
He felt nothing. He could enjoy nothing. They had robbed him of his emotions ... or rather they had made an emotionless copy of his original, which had felt emotion.
He neither wanted to die nor to live. He would exist, recording what he experienced, until he ceased to exist. He felt no fear of the end, merely occasional intellectual curiosity as to what might come before it. Perhaps that was what gave him the impetus to look ahead, a curiosity about what was happening to him.
‘So how will it be, Lew? The transition? What can I expect?’
‘Quick and painless, as all the best surgeons say.’ Lew smiled. ‘We’ll actually be putting you into a quiescent state until the period of transfer is completed.’
Barney smiled. He liked that. Quiescent state.
‘So I’ll suddenly wake up in my new flesh suit? I can’t wait.’
Lew smiled, unsure. ‘Right... Okay, so I’ll leave you to it, Barney. It’ll be about ten minutes from now.’
‘See you then, Lew,’ Barney said, as the exec touched the quit decal on the back of his hand and dematerialised in an instant.
For what felt like a long time Barney sat on the beach and stared at the crushed sapphire effect of the breaking waves, waiting for the commencement of his new life.
Then, the bright scene of the sunlit beach was ripped away from him. He experienced a sudden sensation of falling through darkness, of existing through a timeless duration, which he recalled from the time when the technicians had originally copied him.
He opened his eyes. He was lying in bed. He felt his body, much as he had been aware of his virtual body what seemed like seconds earlier. There was no pain, no discomfort even. He blinked, staring up at a white-painted ceiling.
In fact, he had no way of distinguishing this, his real somatic existence in the real world, from his e-existence in virtual reality.
He looked around him. He was in what looked like a small hospital room, though surrounded by banks of computers and casually dressed techs. Lew Kramer stood at the end of the bed, smiling at him - identical to the Lew who had paid him courtesy calls in paradise.
He attempted to sit up, and to hi
s surprise managed to do so with no ill-effect.
He nodded to Lew. ‘You boys certainly know how to do a good job.’
He swung his legs from the bed, and then for the first time noticed his new body.
He looked down on well-muscled legs, tanned forearms. He seemed to be younger than the original, real Barney Kluger - younger even than he had been in virtual reality. This body seemed to be about thirty-five, leaner and fitter than his original.
He turned his right hand, clenched it into a fist. He felt muscles and sinews working, stretching.
He looked at Lew. ‘I thought I’d be hospitalised for weeks before I could control this thing.’
Lew smiled. ‘We’ve had the body slaved to a functioning program in the NCI for months, Barney. Today it was only a matter of downloading you into the NCI.’ He looked around at the techs in the room. ‘And that seems to have been achieved successfully. Well done.’
Barney reached up, touched something trailing from the back of his head. A hank of leads and wires fell down his back like dreadlocks. He traced them to a cold arrangement of metal spars implanted in his skull. The NCI, evidently.
The leads trailed across the bed and connected him to the com-system. A dozen techs monitored the screens and read-outs.
‘How long have I been out, Lew?’ he asked. ‘How long since the original Barney tanked for one hour that time?’
‘The original tanked in ... what? January ‘40.’
‘And it’s now?’
‘July, ‘41.’
Barney frowned. ‘So you copied me back in ‘40 ... and turned me on, when ... ?’
‘We activated the copied program for three or four short periods over the past year to ensure that it was in full working order.’
‘And yet to me, in VR, it all seemed like one consecutive stretch ...’ Except, of course, for those infinitesimal blackouts that had lasted only nano-seconds, and yet paradoxically seemed in retrospect to have lasted for aeons.
Those, obviously, had been the periods during which the copy had been switched off.
He parted the hospital gown that covered his chest. He was broad, well-developed, his stomach hard and flat.
‘You picked a good one, Lew. Who was the poor bastard?’
The exec shook his head. ‘That’s doesn’t matter, Barney. The person who had this body before you is dead. It belongs to you, now.’
‘Nearly new body,’ Barney grunted. ‘One previous owner. Well-maintained. Suitable for any homeless e-copy.’
He stopped. His voice, to the best of his knowledge, sounded just like his old one.
‘Hey, how’d you do that? I sound like the original Barney.’
‘Coincidence. It’s a couple of semi-tones higher, though. The donor was a life-long New Yorker. Happy with it?’
Barney shrugged. ‘It’ll do, bud. I mean, what good would it do if I complained?’
Lew laughed and consulted a couple of techs.
‘We’ll be through here in another ten, fifteen minutes,’ he told Barney. ‘Then I’ll show you to your rooms, okay?’
The techs disconnected the leads from the NCI, the sound conducting hollowly through the bone of his skull. He dressed in new clothes: casual slacks, a white shirt, black mock-leather shoes. As he worked the unfamiliar fingers, pulled clothing over strange contours of muscle and bone, he wondered why the physical sensations of the real world felt no more real that those of VR. He thought that his experiences here would have had somehow more verisimilitude, more reality. It spoke volumes for the science of VR that he was unable to tell the difference.
The techs left the room, and Lew Kramer gestured to the door. ‘This way, Barney.’
He stood and took his first steps. No dizziness, not even the slightest loss of coordination. He was taller than he had been. Now he looked down on Lew Kramer.
They left the room and ascended in an elevator. The display indicated that they were rising through floors numbered in the nineties.
Lew showed him into his new home, or rather his new jail.
For a prison cell, he had to admit that it was pretty luxurious. It was a suite of rooms overlooking Broadway - Barney worked out that he was in the Mantoni Entertainments HQ, a stone’s throw from the Empire State building. A lounge with all the latest accessories, a bedroom, an adjacent gym and even, he was relieved to see, a small VR room equipped with a state-of-the-art jellytank.
He moved to the vast window and looked out. Far below, the occasional automobile crawled along the quiet street. The sidewalks were packed with pedestrians. He thought that Hal would be somewhere out there, working away. Christ, was Hal in for a hell of a shock when he was contacted by his old partner in disguise.
He turned to Lew. ‘How much freedom do I have, bud? I mean, is this it? This suite?’
Lew gestured. ‘For the time being, yes,’ the exec said. ‘You represent a valuable asset to the Mantoni organisation, Barney.’
‘You don’t want me to do a runner?’
‘I was thinking more in terms of other interested parties who might take it into their heads to kidnap you. Until we’ve assessed the situation, I’m afraid we’ll have to restrict your freedom of movement to this suite and the labs.’
‘And if I decide I need a little recreation, slip out one morning?’
‘We’d find you pretty damned quick and bring you back. Your NCI’s implanted with a tracer. Just to be on the safe side.’
Barney nodded. ‘What about if I want to make a call, check up on an old friend?’
‘I’m afraid that’s out of the question. You’re a top-secret project. Can you imagine the reaction of the media if word got out that we’d brought you back to life?’
‘E-life,’ Barney reminded him.
Lew shrugged. ‘It’d be all the same to the sensationalist news stations.’
Barney moved around the lounge. ‘So I’m pretty much a prisoner here. That’s what it boils down to, I suppose?’
‘A prisoner surrounded by luxury, with room service laid on - even a VR tank.’
Barney nodded. ‘That I appreciate.’ He looked across at Lew, feigning gratitude. ‘It’ll be nice to visit Estelle from time to time.’
Lew proceeded to outline Barney’s day-to-day regime. ‘From nine till one, six days a week, you’ll be down at the labs while the techs run a few tests. After that, the time’s your own. You can use VR up to the legally permitted twenty-four hours, just so long as it doesn’t interfere with the lab hours. I’d advise you start working out, if you intend to make use of VR. You can order meals at any time, just as if you were in a top hotel. There’s even a bar a couple of floors down. You’re welcome to use it at any time.’
Barney nodded. ‘For a high-security penitentiary, Lew, it’s pretty damned civilised.’
‘We try to be humane, here at Mantoni,’ Lew said, sounding as though he were spouting the party line.
Barney stared at him. ‘Yes, but am I, technically speaking, human?’
‘As far as I’m concerned, Barney, you’re as human as me.’
In that case, Barney thought, I pity you.
He moved to a full-length mirror on the wall and for the first time looked into the eyes of his new host.
Lew cleared his throat. ‘What do you think?’
He stared at the face that regarded him with the look of a stranger. It was a hard face, tanned, dark-eyed; it appeared suspicious.
Barney turned to Lew. ‘It looks mean. I’m not sure I like it. I don’t suppose you have one of those ... what the hell are they called? Chus? Programmed with my old appearance?’
Lew nodded. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’
Barney smiled, nodding. ‘I’d appreciate it, Lew,’ he said, and turned back to his reflection.
His life soon slipped into a regular routine. In the mornings he endured the attention of the tech team in the labs on the 90th floor. They jacked leads into his NCI and consulted read-outs and com-screens. They had him performing various isome
tric exercises to calibrate NCI-body compatibility. He underwent memory tests and psychological profiling. He wondered how long they would take to work out that, although on one level their experiment had been a remarkable success, it had failed to reproduce the whole human being. He wondered when they would come to the conclusion that they had created a human-like robot, and what they might do with him then.
In the afternoons, he retreated to his suite and immersed himself via his tank in virtual reality. He always made for the Californian idyll they had created for his original, ignored the villa and the construct of Estelle that presumably still existed there, and made his way up the beach to the rent in the matrix beneath the pine tree.
