by Mazza, Ray
“Michael…? Michael!”
She expected to see him sitting on the ground, or perhaps back up on the bough. Had he slipped out from under her arms? Was she holding him too tightly?
Ezra stood and jogged around their meeting place, calling his name. No answer. His shirt lay quietly on the ground, heaped amongst the grass.
And then, as her ordinary senses began to return after being lost in the elation of kissing Michael, she felt it. Something was wrong. She could feel him, just as she could feel the weakness of the tree so long ago. He was right there, but she could not see him.
She stepped back, felt his presence move back as well. She stepped back again, expecting to see him or feel him where she stood. Again, he moved back with her. Michael was… he was occupying the same space as her.
Ezra’s face contorted into an expression of terror. Is he… is Michael… inside me?
“No… no… this can’t be real.”
Slowly, she could feel his thoughts trickling into her mind. And then briefly she could think nothing else, she experienced nothing else – thinking only his thoughts, using only his brain. It felt like waking from a coma and remembering… everything. For a moment, she was Michael. Then, slowly, the valve shut off and her own thoughts returned.
Little by little, the tide washed back until his thoughts came in unison with her own. They were one. For an instant, Ezra and Michael felt their unity. They were one and the same. It was the ultimate embrace – the only way soul mates should exist.
But the moment passed, and they receded once again into muddled consciousness. What the hell am I? Or what are we? Am I Michael? Or Ezra? How do we stop this… make it go back? Please, please, somebody fix this. It’s not real! This must be a dream. I’m sorry I missed curfew! I’m sorry! Make it stop!
Ezra stumbled through the copse toward home, but didn’t make it. Near a withered bramble, she fell to her knees and cried. She rubbed her eyes with the palms of her hands, but the world became no clearer. Ezra wailed and screamed. She rolled around in the fetal position kicking at the air. Tears scorched rivers down her cheeks. They were the tears of two people.
~
Ezra’s caretakers spoke to each other through a video call.
“I don’t understand how this could have happened,” said the man. “I’ve…”
The lady on the screen shook her head. “But clearly it’s possible.”
“She’s only fifteen and she was able to do this?” the man said.
“Poor Ezra… do you think she’ll be all right?”
“I certainly hope so. I ran diagnostics on her, and indeed, what happened is exactly as it appears.”
“We need to talk to her,” said the lady. “I’m going to give her something to help her sleep tonight. In the morning, we’ll sit down with her and explain all that we left out before.”
“Yes...” the man agreed, “but we need to be careful. She’ll be extremely delicate right now.”
“How will this affect the others?”
“We won’t tell the others,” said the man. “But Ezra has been the most promising of all, and this – all things considered – is a breakthrough.”
Chapter 1
When the World Opens Up
Trevor Leighton plummeted over ten stories toward the cold, indifferent stones of the plaza below. He tumbled upside-down as the masonry whipped past in a blur of browns and ivories. Daggers of wind tore at his scalp and whistled past his good ear – his other one still bleeding. But what did it matter now? Barely thirty, and he was about to die.
As the ground approached, time slowed, and he found a moment to give attention to his senses. He could smell the thick, billowing humidity in the air that carried undertones of age-old cathedral stone. A hidden taste of apples played on his tongue, perhaps a recent memory, or from odors wafted on an updraft that had curled through the food tents below.
The closer the ground came, the longer it took to get there, like the time dilation experienced when falling into a black hole. Maybe it was because all other portions of his mind were shutting down and concentrating on the inevitable.
Trevor’s body twisted in the weightlessness of freefall until he was looking at the sky. A memory of his sister, Amy, smiled at him. The fiery crescent of the eclipsing sun also smiled at him.
He smiled back.
But the ground was upon him. Only feet away.
Less than a second to live.
And then, before he’d even reached the ground, his soul began to join with the universe, as if it knew it could reclaim him just a little early. Trevor was a solitary drop of water reuniting with an infinite ocean. In this premature moment, his memories siphoned from his mind and splashed into the world around him. It was his entire life flashing before his eyes.
Many of his memories were happy ones, and Trevor clung to them. But he was also different than other people. He needed to keep his soul in a warm, cozy place. Otherwise, the darkness would seep through the cracks of his thoughts.
He had to hold strong.
He was nearly there. He couldn’t let it in. He couldn’t let her in.
And then something went wrong. In the deepest recesses of his mind, he felt something slip through. Something unwelcome.
In that same moment, the world sped up. The moon snuffed out the final sliver of the sun and cast the land into grim twilight. It was the last thing Trevor Leighton saw before he hit the ground at one-hundred and two miles per hour.
Chapter 2
Two Weeks Earlier. November, 2012.
Trevor Leighton shivered suddenly, then blinked and rubbed his eyes. He ignored the strange sensation, and then returned his attention to the computer monitor.
He was in. Butterflies tickled his stomach. Trevor glanced around the office to make sure nobody was watching him. He readied his favorite online journal of genetic engineering so he could switch to it if anyone decided to drop by.
It was too easy how he’d gotten the password. He knew he’d get a standard administrator password, but getting this password was unexpected. Two weeks ago, he’d purchased a key logger – a device you could connect to a computer between the keyboard and the motherboard, and then it would collect a log of all key presses anyone typed. Really cool stuff. He’d procured a high-end model, one he was able to install inside his laptop without hassle.
Then he simply dropped his laptop at IT for routine updates, knowing they would log in with their administrator password. When they returned it the next day, he checked for the logger, momentarily uneasy that they might have found it.
Still there. Safe.
Better yet, it had worked perfectly. Scanning through the data, Trevor found that not only had IT installed the updates, but the guy had visited a dating website, and then logged into one of the company’s firewalls to change some settings. The firewall. Trevor had the firewall passwords. Just knowing the firewall passwords was badass.
At first, he had no desire to use them. He’d just been doing this for fun.
Until yesterday. Trevor had found a not-so-legit public server that kept copies of hundreds of great movies. He wanted to download them through his office’s blazing fast fiber optics network. Except the firewall blocked not-so-legit network traffic.
That’s how Trevor had decided to step across the line of legality. But only for a bit, he’d told himself. It wouldn’t hurt anyone. He just wanted to transfer some harmless data.
He looked at his desktop computer screen. Yes, he was definitely in. The passwords had worked on the first attempt. While taking a big slurp of his apple flavored juice box, he glanced around to make sure no one was coming. Coast clear.
Trevor’s fingers trembled, hovering over the keys. Then his fingers became a blur. He typed a series of exceptions that would allow network traffic to and from his machine to flow unrestricted, then hit Enter. Done.
Firewall changes successful.
To test his reconfiguration, he attempted a connection to the question
able public server. It responded:
Connected to Reality’s Edge media server.
Come for a movie, stay for a byte.
Within moments he was downloading his first movie. And holy crap, the entire damned file was only going to take one minute to transfer. He queued up a long list, and then flipped back to real work.
Trevor resumed reading the genetic engineering journal. He finished his juice box, crumpled it, and tossed it over his shoulder into the trash. His arm caught his headphone cord and they ripped off his head and clattered to the floor. He leaned down to pick them up. When he returned his attention to his monitor, he did a double-take. He could swear he’d seen the text on the web page shift. It looked like the phrase “genetic chain reaction” had changed to “genetic chain rwaction.” Or was it a typo that had been there all along?
He stared at it for a few seconds, confused, and hit the reload button. The phrase “genetic chain rwaction” now read “gnnettc chnin rwacteon.” A few other words sprinkled across the page glared back at him, misspelled. Reload. “pnnottc uhnin rwpcteod.” Reload. “81`-[=bu2+n@*cpceo
Then his entire screen went garbled.
“Crap.”
He hit the keys and clicked the mouse. Nothing. His music player had been playing Lady Gaga off his personal memory stick. Now, it skipped over and over. Had there been a virus on the server? No, he’d made sure it was safe. This was unrelated. Hopefully.
Trevor reached for the power button on his computer and held it in until the green light of life faded from its body. It was a hyper-threaded beast of a machine faster than anything commercially available. One of the perks of working for a company that specialized in computer hardware and software was that you always got nice toys.
But this toy just had a seizure. It was the strangest computer malfunction he’d ever seen. Computers didn’t lock up in such an ordered fashion, with letters on the screen changing and rearranging themselves. It gave Trevor an uneasy feeling.
~
A faint, unpleasant odor hung in the air, like burnt rubber. As Trevor Leighton’s computer rebooted, he heard someone a few cubes away exclaim a drawn-out, “Ah, maaaan!”
Trevor sat up straight in his chair, planting his hands on its arms (the right one perpetually wobbly – one day he would tear it clear off), then craned his neck and glanced in the direction of the voice. Their cubicles had low walls to promote a more open environment. But it tended to cause health problems as engineers slumped in their chairs in attempts to be less visible. It wasn’t your most socially-inclined cadre of employees.
The voice was that of the new hire, a kinetic and wiry kid, freshly cherry-picked from MIT. The kid raised his arms and threatened his monitor with his middle finger and an obscene gesture originating from his crotch.
Trevor turned his attention back to his own screen.
Great.
It had come back to life, but now coldly displayed the “blue screen of death.” Rebooting again didn’t help.
He thought he could hear a faint hum in the air, then the office lights flickered, dimmed for a few seconds, got bright, and then returned to normal – the kind of thing he’d expect to see if they’d had an electric chair in one of the conference rooms and just fried an employee for using too much Facebook. A power surge maybe?
He looked at his digital wristwatch: 2:41 pm. He might be able to cut his day short; it would take the rest of the afternoon for them to set him up with a new rig, and he couldn’t do real work on the laptop. Maybe he’d even have time to go get a haircut and do laundry. It had been too long, on both counts, due to long hours. He removed his sapphire-blue memory stick from the non-functioning heap of metal and silicon and stuck it in his pocket, preparing to head out after a call to IT.
~
In minutes, the office floor crawled with his coworkers as they huddled in groups, chattering loudly, pointing at computers and shaking heads. Apparently, nobody had internet access and half of them were getting the blue screen of death.
An IT guy wearing a Barenaked Ladies t-shirt and torn jeans careened from computer to computer with a CD book in one hand and some gizmo in the other. He winced every time he noticed another computer with a blue screen. He jammed the gizmo into a machine nearby, waited a second, then yanked it out with a huff. Then he barreled straight past Trevor, went into Trevor’s cube, and plugged the device into his computer. A red LED lit up on the gizmo and it chirped in a minor chord.
“What’s that mean?” Trevor said.
“Network card’s fried. They all are.” The IT guy said from halfway under Trevor’s desk.
“I didn’t know that was possible,” said Trevor.
“Under ordinary circumstances, it isn’t. But you wanna talk about impossible? It’s the first time I’ve ever seen this in my life,” he unplugged the network cable from the back of Trevor’s machine and held it up. The insulation coating clung melted and blackened around the connection tip.
“Jesus.” So that’s what the smell had been.
“Most of our networking hardware is toast.” He paused, squinting at Trevor. “What, exactly, were you doing when this happened?”
Trevor felt a sharp knot form in his stomach. He tried to speak casually. “Same thing as always. Reading the journals. Why?”
“Why?” the IT guy said, “Because our network monitor showed a huge spike in data transmission to your machine just before everything fizzled.”
Chapter 3
Dissemination
Damon Winters took a hit of his inhaler and then stashed it in his suit pocket. When the elevator doors opened, Damon stepped onto the 16th floor of the Winters building, the floor on which Trevor’s cube was situated. Some journalists listed Damon’s net worth as three hundred million dollars, while others valued him at closer to four.
Damon was in charge of this branch of the company, “Day Eight,” a private maker of research software and equipment. This building held over fifteen-hundred of its employees. Day Eight had other branches in Seattle, the Silicon Valley, Switzerland, and Japan. But that didn’t matter at the moment, because right now, this office was going to shit.
~
Trevor had only seen Damon a few times, speaking at conferences or striding through the lobby of the building. Damon had a peculiar habit of never getting in the same elevator as anyone he didn’t mean to be with. On the occasions Trevor had been waiting for an elevator at the same time, Damon had let everyone get on and stepped back to wait for another. That didn’t happen often, though, because Damon liked to arrive when it was still dark out, leave when it became dark again in the evening, and have his meals delivered to him.
Trevor remembered being particularly stirred by one of Damon’s conference speeches, titled Why the Human Race Will Become Redundant. Damon opened by explaining that the rate of technological advance was increasing more and more quickly every day. He described how progress in the technology sector over the past thirty years alone was comparatively more than all the technological advances made in the history of the world prior to that, and was accelerating.
Damon hinted at a looming technology that would change the entire structure of business, science, economics, politics, both home and work life, and the very process of invention. It was some form of artificial intelligence that diverged from the standard approaches. Unfortunately, the talk had been vague and left important details up to the imagination – such as how this new form of intelligence was implemented, when it would be realized, or exactly what it could do.
But, he said, how it would come to pass didn’t matter – it was provable that it would exist simply because the rate of technological progression must continue along its perpetually-increasing curve, and that humans alone couldn’t contain such intelligence required to continue the trend, so the gap must be filled primarily by AI. If we accepted that fact now and th
ought about the changes it would bring, as a country, as corporations, as a world, and as individuals, we would be better prepared to face both the challenges and opportunities that would arise.
Trevor was excited that his company might be working on world-changing technology – even if he didn’t get to contribute first-hand.
And now Damon Winters was here. He’d come down from the top floor to his level, a place Trevor had never seen him. Something must be very wrong.
Six men accompanied Damon clad in white lab coats and safety glasses, ID badges on their chests, half of them carrying brushed chrome toolboxes. They were lab technicians from the top of the building where Damon kept his brightest prodigies, working on generously-funded and highly-secretive projects. Like the world-changing technology, perhaps. At least those were the rumors.
Damon’s team surveyed the floor with a sweep of penetrating gazes. Trevor and his co-workers always referred to them as “lab coats” because regardless of their positions, that’s what they all sported – white lab coats – all except Damon, who lived in a charcoal-gray suit.
Trevor didn’t know for sure what their actual jobs were. You needed a special badge to get above the 25th floor, and he was not special.
The lab coats dispersed. A particularly chiseled lab coat with thin silver-frame glasses came up to Trevor’s cube and addressed the IT guy.
“Mr. Marken, excellent job so far. Load Mr. Leighton’s machine on this and please come with me,” he said, handing the IT guy an aluminum, telescoping dolly.
The IT guy stood wide-eyed and wrung his trembling hands.
