by Aaron Bunce
“What name, Anna? You said you found something in your head. What did you find?”
“I don’t want to think about it again. Not now. Please don’t make me. The name, it hurts me to even think about it. Please don’t ask me.” Anna’s head drooped once again, her face landing in waiting palms.
Frustrated and desperate for answers, Jacoby reached out to the only person he thought might have some answers.
“Poole, we need you right now. Please?” Jacoby asked, casting the question inward as well.
He caught movement out of the corner of his eye, Shane looking to Lana. It was a significant look, the kind people shared when someone else is in the room and they know something everyone else doesn’t. Or in their case, didn’t know something everyone else seemed to.
The silence stretched on in his head for a few seconds, his echoing heartbeat an almost interminable sound. Lex popped up on the back of Soraya’s seat, the two still a little flushed and sweaty from their workout competition. Shane and Lana behind everyone else, looking around and squinting, as if the right angle or perspective might give them a glimpse of the strange, invisible person everyone had been talking about.
Consider yourself the lucky ones. He’s not all he’s cracked up to be. He’s more like an itchy mole on my ass that I can’t quite scratch.
Begrudgingly, and only after Jacoby insinuated he was a butt mole, a familiar pressure shifted inside his head, and Poole materialized. Somewhat slower than usual, Jacoby noted.
“Have you even seen your backside lately? Honestly, how could you tell if you had a mole back there? Totally gross. Totally…gross. I don’t know how you homo sapiens grow so comfortable squeezing waste out your hind ends like that, but, man…”
“Well, it got you out of your hidey hole, didn’t it?”
Poole shook a fist at him, then turned and took in the bridge.
“One, two, three,” he started to count, like a teacher accounting for students, “you’ve got pretty much the whole family together, Jacky-Boy. Is this my coming out party, a soiree, my debutante ball? Did you get busy and finally indoctrinate the others into ‘club Poole’ while I was resting? Can I finally stop tiptoeing around the ‘unbelievers’?”
“No, no, and unfortunately, no. Sorry. We’ll have to do the first thing you said when things have calmed down around here. Or maybe never. But first…”
“Ugh! Meat sack,” Poole sighed, dramatically. “Just once, Jacky-Boy. Just…freaking…once, I’d like a little respect. A little something other than: ‘Poole we need help’ or ‘Poole we can’t possible think of a way out of this without you’. Maybe, just maybe, summon me forth from the depths to show some appreciation for my many contributions. Is a hug too much to ask for? A high five? That’s all I want. I mean, come on. Rub an invisible lamp, and poof, I could have exploded into being with all the fire and majesty I deserve. You really don’t understand how much you are killing me. Like literally…I’m shriveling up and dying inside your head! Out of all the organisms trapped in that rock, I had to be the one lucky enough to get snorted up your sinus cavity. I know how the unlucky sperm feels, and let me tell you, it sucks.”
“I’m sorry. We can form a support group after we’ve gotten everything figured out. Uh, Soraya can be in charge of cookies and snacks. That okay?”
Soraya gave him a bandaged, half-nub thumbs up.
“Really, corn cakes, I don’t even rank the whole thumb?” Poole spat.
“It’s there in spirit.”
“Shoot me…”
“Oh. I can do drinks. We used to do round tables at the VA. They had really crappy coffee and hot tea, but we loved it. I can do those real good!” Lex chimed in, interrupting.
“Perfect,” Jacoby said, “then we’ll sit down and talk about our feelings and the meaning of life. I promise, but for now, Anna has some important questions. I’ll rub your lamp next time.”
Soraya choked and looked away to mask her laughter. Lex laughed openly.
“I’ll deal with you two later,” Poole turned his glare their way.
“Poole?” Anna breathed.
“Well, I guess I wouldn’t mind if Lex rubbed the lamp, but Soraya you are totally in time out!”
“Ahh!” Lex yelled and threw something right through Poole, the item hitting the console behind him and clattering to the ground.
“Is this always how it is?” Shane asked, his voice rising above the din. “It’s like watching one of those television shows about teenagers at school. Ya know, where they’re all crazy horny or on drugs and always getting into trouble? Do you remember those? Except we can only see and hear half of what people are saying and laughing at. This shit is crazy. Nothing makes any sense.” He spoke to Lana, next to him, but Soraya chimed in, too, the room quickly getting out of control.
“It’s like the holidays for us all the time–crazy cousins, drunk in laws, and everything! You just wait. It’ll get better,” Jacoby said.
“When I was having the seizures,” Anna started to say, chiming in during a pause in the chaos, “as you said, my brain was rejecting your attempts to merge the glove’s neural infrastructure with my own. How exactly did you end up fixing the problem?”
Jacoby heard Anna speak, despite her voice lacking its usual strength. He waved the others quiet.
“I’m glad you asked, Anna baby, because I’ve actually been randy to brag about it since our exodus from the meat grinder. You could say the…”
“Randy?”
“Don’t interrupt when the adults are talking, Jacoby. Please take your plate of chickey nuggets and macaroni and cheese back to the kiddie table in the kitchen and behave yourself,” Poole chastised. “As I was saying. You could say the issue of your brain perplexed and very nearly defeated yours truly, and yet it was a rather nifty piece of ‘on the fly’ bioengineering that ended up saving the day. Nifty and lucky, but oh well, that fact is immaterial now since everything worked out. The issue wasn’t actually integrating the glove’s infrastructure with your physiology, as strange as that sounds. I reverse engineered the hardware in the glove itself, breaking it down and re-growing it organically.” Poole turned and looked right at Jacoby. “Kind of like melting crayons down, mixing them together to make new colors, and cooling them in molds. The only difference was, one was Jacky-Boy’s snacky time when he was a child, and the other remade your cellular structure. Not a piece of cake, but a definitive success in the end.”
Soraya whispered to Shane and Lana, evidently giving them an insider view at what they couldn’t see or hear.
“Asshole,” Jacoby whispered.
“He really said that? He said you eat crayons? What in the hell?” Shane laughed, and then sat back to rub his face. “This is bat-shit crazy, but entertaining!”
“So, I’m guessing the problem was with my brain, right? Getting my brain to accept the electrical signals and interpreting them?” Anna said.
“Very good, Anna. Yes. First it was converting digital signals from the glove’s firmware. That was when the seizures started. Forget about interfacing with computers. If we couldn’t get your brain to take over for the glove’s simple programming, then the project would be a total failure. As I said, we broke the glove down and reverse engineered it into your body. You became the firmware then. First problem fixed. But the issue continued to be electrical in nature and the way your synapses interpreted code received from computing sources. The binary pulses simply proved too dissimilar from the neurological impulse receptors in your brain. They wouldn’t accept and decode. It was like someone trying to talk to Jacoby in any other language but bad English. A translator was needed.”
“That doesn’t sound like a little issue,” Anna said, and judging by her expression, Jacoby knew she was waiting for Poole to reveal something significant.
“Actually, quite small, ten millivolts on average per neuron firing. But once I realized the real root of the problem, the answer fell into place quickly. It actually proved to be quite genius,
Anna my cybernetic beauty. Good ole’ fashioned genius, if I do say so myself. You see, we were going to discard the seizure chip embedded in your spinal cord, as it was totally barbaric and thanks to the correction of your seizure-inducing genetic defect, quite unnecessary. But after beating our head against the inside of Jacoby’s skull for a while on the voltage issue, I, well, we, realized that the implant was the answer to your problem. Ta da! Done. Problem solved. The day was saved. Now heap your praise upon me. I’ll take two virgin sacrifices, thank you!”
“I don’t understand,” Jacoby started to say.
“But how?” Anna asked, her exhaustion manifesting as impatience.
“Well, since you asked so nicely. I’m so proud of this one, btw. We converted the implant into a buffer chip, complete with its own rudimentary programming–a small and specifically copied portion of the dream algorithm in your brain. In essence, it became a digital transformer to intercept the signals on their way to and from your brain. It would receive, read the signal, boost or reduce the voltage, and recode it to the synaptic values your brain could understand.”
“Rudimentary programming? And by that, you mean, software. Like an artificial intelligence, or maybe an operating system? What do you think of when I say, ‘the one’?” Anna asked, scratching her neck.
Poole’s smile faded a bit. He reached up and twisted his mustache, then looked to Jacoby, and back to Anna. “‘the one’? Honestly, I have no idea what that means. Unless it was that really cheesy Jet Li movie about multiple dimensions. That one was Soraya’s guilty pleasure in college.”
“Anna, what does that mean, ‘the one’?” Jacoby asked, the hairs on his neck standing on end. Soraya and Lex continued to whisper to Shane and Lana, the two taking turns in the retelling.
“Yeah. What does that mean?” Shane said, leaning forward suddenly.
“Dude, I’m still stuck on the fact that she’s got an artificial intelligence in her head? Did you do that to us, too?” Lex asked, her voice rising above the others.
“Whoa!” Poole cried out, disappeared, and reappeared on the other side of the room. “Simmer down! It wasn’t a big deal. It’s not a big deal…”
“He’s says it’s not a big deal, but it kind of sounds like one to me!” Lex said to Shane.
“We just needed something to serve as a ‘gatekeeper’ so to speak. A buffer to protect the tissues in Anna’s brain from the incoming signals. But it was just until your mind finished adapting. Then your brain would take over the burden and it would no longer be needed anymore. See? A genius but temporary solution.”
Jacoby immediately thought back to all the science fiction and horror movies he’d watched. Specifically, the ones where evil computers took over, identified mankind as a problem in need of fixing, and inevitably either enslaved or tried to wipe them all out. He knew they were just movies, but they all seemed to be based on the same premise–artificial intelligences becoming self-aware and realizing how people were all basically dicks and needed to die.
“You put an artificial intelligence in a chip, embedded in my brain. And you didn’t think that might ever become an issue?”
“We put safeguards…it was just a little program…it’s not like it could just disconnect the signals between your brain and body and take over,” Poole sputtered, but Jacoby cut him off.
“Not to beat a dead horse, but it was a solution to a problem you created.”
“Now don’t you start on that…”
“Exactly,” Soraya chimed in, before Poole could argue back.
“But could it? Can it? If it wanted to, could the program actually take over my body. I know it sounds crazy, but this is my head, and after what I just saw, I’m not feeling so confident that it isn’t a problem.”
“What do you mean ‘what you just saw’, Anna, darling?” Poole said, smiling and laughing uncomfortably. He hooked an arm around her shoulders and gave her a mock, playful hug.
“Are you sure you guys aren’t just all fucking nuts? This is entertaining, but I don’t know. This feels like some straight jacket stuff for sure. You guys are talking to an invisible guy about programs running in her brain,” Shane said, moving out from around the console and pointing at Anna, “That just might be able to take over her body and turn her into what, some killer robot? Could it take over her whole brain and become Skynet, like in those Terminator movies?”
“What…? Did this guy really just ask that?” Poole asked, his mouth going slack.
“Exactly,” Soraya chimed in.
Poole’s hair started on fire, his face shifting between several primary colors before settling on red. He stomped his feet, heat and flames splashing out from inside his trousers.
“Really, Okra Cakes? You’re going to be that girl? The one that goes through the entire conversation, letting the less pretty girls around you say all the stupid shit, and all you’re going to contribute is ‘exactly’ and ‘seriously’? Like they’re not capable of their own intelligent arguments but you’re not going to correct them? You are…so…much…better…than…that!”
“Exactly!”
“Argh!” Poole howled, the flames spilling off his head and bubbling against the bridge’s low ceiling. A moment later, it all disappeared, and the color in his face faded.
“You’re lucky I installed that purge valve, otherwise I would have totally gone thermonuclear on you again. That was so close,” Poole muttered, and adjusted his jacket’s lapel. “Honestly, people. After all these decades in computer advancements, the colonization of the solar system, space flight, and all that jazz, and Baldy over here brings up The Terminator? I expected that from Jacoby, but not the rest of you! I think I need to rethink things. Humanity’s downfall might not be such a bad thing.”
Jacoby smiled and cleared his throat. “Anna, what do you mean by ‘The One’?”
“Listen,” Poole interrupted, before Anna could continue. “Let me phrase this as gently as possible. No and no. And by no, I mean, hell no. The programming infrastructure was incredibly simple, and although we constructed it with the ability to grow and learn, it was only going to be in use for a short time, so there was no risk. It had to be done. You needed the ability to interface with almost any computer or hardware, and not be hampered by differences in computing language. I mean, asking computer programmers and engineers to settle on one programming language is like asking them to decide what’s better between Star Wars or Star Trek. It was just a bit of transitory software, anyways, considering the biomodifications we had already been initiated in your brain. As I already said,” Poole paused dramatically and tried to catch his breath, “it was designed to be superfluous as soon as your brain was ready. It’s gone now, so why-Why-WHY are we talking about it? Especially when we have so many other important things to talk about.”
“Because I just talked with it, inside my head,” Anna said, quietly.
“What? Anna, dumplings, that is literally impossible. You must be mistaken. With respect…”
“Ever since leaving Hyde I’ve felt like my brain was broken up into two compartments, like partitions. I ended up with a ton of data just crammed in my head. I don’t know exactly how it got there, but I’m pretty sure I picked it up when interfacing with the terminals back on the station. I couldn’t access it, though, and it always felt like the information, or something controlling it, moved it around so I either couldn’t find or see it. As the days went on, I could feel it, growing in strength, like it was actually fighting for control of my brain. Earlier, when that crazy stuff happened with Jacoby, I pulled him into the shower. I touched the water control to turn it on and somehow got lost in my own head for over twenty minutes. It only felt like seconds to me. But when it happened, it felt like something was taking over, I don’t know how to describe it, push my consciousness into a small, dark corner. Then Jacoby comes to me, with data Lana pulled from the NavCom. The Betty never had any data on this station on Titan…you know, the place we’re burning hard for? If the Betty did
n’t know about it, how were we able to create a route there?”
Jacoby watched Anna, the strain still evident in her face and posture. For his part, Poole listened intently and didn’t move, save to twist the ends of his mustache.
“I tried to look into my head for the data again, because if I’d formulated the route to Titan but didn’t know where we were going or how, it raised a whole host of questions I couldn’t answer. I found it, Poole. The data–whole folders on facilities I’d never heard of before. Titan, Galileo, Venus sub-orbit atmospheric station. But the data fought me, and what I could see, was covered up…locked. When I dug too deep, it fought back again and tried to sweep me aside. But this time Jacoby was there, so were Lex and Soraya. I managed to fight back and win control. When I did, it was like a dark canvas was ripped off my mind and I suddenly was able to see everything–my memories, the emotions and feedback from the others, the data I’d pulled from Hyde. It was all accessible, my thoughts built it into some amazing virtual storeroom. And at the middle of it all, was another me. She was a program, Poole. One designed to restrict and control the flow of data. She was the one keeping that information from me. I’m sure of it. But she feels broken, like there are errors or key pieces of data missing in her programing and she doesn’t know how to proceed. She kept talking about ‘The One’ and the need to ‘awaken something’.”
“So, what does that mean? Awaken what? You know what this Titan facility is?” Shane asked.
“We’ve already agreed that Titan isn’t where we want to go, what does it matter what the facility is?” Lana asked.
Jacoby listened as the others fell into an argument over where they were going and why, but he kept his focus on Anna and Poole.
“We’re talking about it because there was something in Anna’s brain that wanted us to go there. It wanted us to go there, and it didn’t want Anna, or any of us, to know why. That feels like a pretty big deal. My first question is this, how did you not know that any of this was happening in her head, Poole?” Jacoby said, talking over the others. Hearing him, they quickly quieted.
