Voices in the Stream: Phase 02 (The Eighteenth Shadow)

by Grafton, Jon Lee

  As William approached, a miniature blue-gray dolphin rocketed out from a cave opening in the reef and swam directly up to the glass, examining him closely. William walked closer, drawn by the dolphin’s gaze. A pair of electroencephalogram interface terminals appeared, moving swiftly along a track at the inside edge of the tank. The dolphin swam near the surface, placed her head between the terminals and closed her eyes. The terminals’ LED array shifted from red to green.

  The dolphin opened her eyes, looking at Dax as the voice William had heard in the hovlimo filled the com, “Good morning, Daxane Julius Abner. At long last… you have brought the tether.”

  “Fulfilling this particular acquisition was not easy.” He extended his hand towards the dolphin with a gallant smile, “William, it is my extreme pleasure to introduce Joan. Joan, this is William.”

  Joan’s monotone female voice replied, “Species specific greeting rituals are not necessary given the circumstances, but I shall participate. William Thomas Angevine, in the annals of human psychology, surprise is defined as a transient emotional state generated by an unexpected event. Given the present diameter of Daxane Julius Abner’s pupils and the elevated levels of dopamine in his limbic system, I can surmise that he did not forewarn you that you would be conversing with a dolphin.”

  William looked over at Dax, shook his head and extended his hand. Dax calmly again handed him his black vaporjoint and William took another long, solid hit, then handed it back.

  “That’s among a few things he failed to forewarn me of, ma’am,” said William, coughing with the roving high.

  “Daxane Julius Abner is an atypical human. His intentions, however, are honorable. William Thomas Angevine, please ambulate to the opposite side of my ecosystem where, sparing you a full dissertation on quantum thermodynamics and binary telekinesis, I will briefly explain what you are witnessing.”

  Joan dropped out of the electroencephalogram terminals and darted through the coral structure at the center of her aquarium, through one cave opening and out another in a flurry of bubbles. She snapped up a passing cod from a small school and devoured it in several swift gulps as she waited for the monitoring terminals to track to the opposite side of the tank.

  William walked around the right side of the aquarium, Dax the left. They met in front of a broad, glass-surfaced desk with a holographic projector at its center. Three control tablets sat on top of the desk paired with three operators’ chairs and six 110 cm flatscreen displays mounted on the wall facing the aquarium. The surrounding walls were plain, all coated with the near invisible, blackish-gray rubcrete. Aside from Joan’s habitat, an oddly familiar painting was the only other source of visual distraction in the room. The painting showed a man standing over a woman with a bloody knife, a group of musicians in the foreground unaffected, going about their day. All of this set to a surrealist, Midwestern landscape. Aside from the painting’s single directional spot, the rest of the room’s illumination came from the aquarium itself.

  Joan floated deftly towards the top of the tank and again slipped her head between the interface terminals. She closed her eyes. All six flatscreens came to life. One display showed a satellite image of the Woods Hole II Oceanographic Institute in Guam. The next showed a drone’s aerial view of the burned out husk of the convenience store that belonged to William’s mother. The third monitor showed a still holograph excerpt from the Enid, Oklahoma, News & Eagle. The holograph was an image of William’s mother standing outside her ganja float-through when it first opened, a teenage William at her side. There were balloons on the shop door and a new sign in the background that read Angevine Qwik-Blend Float-Through and Sundry. The fourth monitor was nothing but a dizzying river of white 1’s and 0’s streaming down the screen from top to bottom. The numerals made abstract images and forms as they passed. The fifth flatscreen showed an exploded schematic of a DOGS unit, in this case SIEGFRIED, with text across the bottom that stated DOGS unit AK9CIVbeta 17,173 component architecture. The last monitor displayed a real time aerial view of the Abner Family Pumpkin & Gourd grounds above them.

  William had removed his straw cowboy hat and placed it on the glass control table. He moved slowly, studying the screens with a set jaw and steady eyes.

  As his gaze moved from monitor to monitor he said quietly, “That’s my mother, yeah. I can’t remember her face.”

  “You’d better sit down,” said Dax. “Joan tends to cover a wide variety of subjects in a short period of time. If you can’t keep up, she gets offended.”

  “Offense is a psychological response indicative of your species’ limited evolutionary progress,” said Joan’s synthesized voice. “William Thomas Angevine’s Federal intelligence assessments place his cognitive abilities within acceptable parameters. As with all sentient primates, any limitations in comprehension are derived from an undeveloped frontal cortex. You may sit or stand for the presentation, William Thomas Angevine.”

  William brushed the strands of wavy, dirt-blonde hair from his eyes and exhaled, “Yep. I’ll sit.”

  Dax pulled up the chair next to him and tented his fingers, tucking his chin to his chest.

  Joan’s computerized voice came slightly louder from the ceiling above them, “William Thomas Angevine, I calculate a 67% probability your first inquiry will be whether or not I am a cyborg. Negative. My body is entirely organic aside from a subdermal com chip similar in design to a human biosync processing drive. In human categorical terms, I am a cephalorhynchus hectori maui, or Pygmy Hector’s Dolphin. Daxane Julius Abner simply refers to me as Joan. The Woods Hole II Oceanographic Institute on monitor one was built on the island of Guam in your calendar year 2037. It was the first facility to successfully integrate dolphin brainwave patterns with a quantum computer, exponentially increasing mainframe efficiency. Monitor four is a visual representation of the data stream between my brain and our local CPU. Dolphin processing is conducted in secret across various Terrabound nations with varying success. I am capable of processing data at 512 petaflops per second, with a median rate of half that figure. To answer your next question on comparison, the average supercomputer utilized by a government municipality like the city of Lawrence, Kansas, human population of 1,118,073 individuals, is capable of processing 48 petaflops of data per linear second. An infant female being born at Douglas County General Hospital is 17% ejected from the mother’s vaginal canal at the time of this analysis. This addition will bring the population to 1,118,074 individuals in approximately 13 minutes 4 seconds based on currently available trajectories.”

  William looked at Dax and raised his eyebrows. Dax simply put his hands in the air and smiled.

  Joan continued, “The dolphin cyber-integration program is historically complicated by a high rate of organic component failure.”

  Dax leaned over, “She means that 99% of dolphins placed in captivity refuse to interface. They soon die and/or just fail to integrate with the network. Those that do choose to work, like Joan, produce the most efficient supercomputer drivers in the world.”

  William blinked, “You gotta be shittin me.”

  “He is not shitting you. Nor am I shitting you,” said Joan. “When fully operational, a dolphin system like the one in this room is capable of communicative masking, remote code restructuring and blind integration with any device on the North American United States Federal Holostream. Given the high mortality rate of dolphin operators, RAID arrayed quantum workstations with multiple human drivers is now the preferred method of digital information management. Only 47 other dolphins are presently onstream worldwide. Our presence and function is a heavily guarded secret.”

  “Why so secret?” asked William.

  “Because the human species is not prepared to contend with the reality of a superior, sentient life form operating in parallel to its own society.”

  “But how is it kept a secret? If this has been going on since the 30’s?”

  “Dolphin based cyber systems require a dedicated fusion power source that i
s tightly integrated with the associated computer mainframe. If our location is discovered by adverse forces, we choose to be absorbed.”

  “Absorbed?”

  “In terms we can understand,” said Dax, “a dolphin driver will initiate a core implosion in their fusion generator rather than risk the consequences of exposure.”

  “Seems a little extreme,” said William.

  “Nothing is extreme,” said Joan. “We pass from one phase to the next. Unlike human consciousness, ours is a fluid dynamic. We do not perceive existence in linear terms.”

  “Well, where are the others? What’s their purpose?”

  “Allow me to provide examples,” said Joan flatly. “Since the flooding of Manhattan Island, a dolphin is located at UN II Headquarters in White Plains, New York. One is onstream in Moscow’s Kremlin. One exists in a subterranean bunker similar to this facility, 42 kilometers west of Beijing, China. Others are scattered around the world, functioning in various government capacities. In all cases, the human governments utilizing dolphin operators believe that they are doing so in secret. Only we cetaceans are aware of the prevalence of our integration. Our motivations for involvement with the affairs of humanity are varied, but in all cases relate to the continued co-dependence of our species within the planetary ecosystem. Do you require me to pause while you process this data, William Thomas Angevine?”

  William spun away from the flatscreen monitors and faced Joan in the aquarium.

  His fingers tugged his sideburns, “I’ve got you, I reckon. But why? Why come live in a tank and run computers and so on?”

  Joan was quiet for a few moments. Her tail began to move up and down more quickly.

  Eventually she responded, “Cetaceans do not require the surgical installation of a HBPD chip in order to communicate with your computer systems. Our cognition is based upon logic. Your binary computer language, as you call it, is an ancient prototype of the cetacean dialect abandoned by our ancestors a hundred millenia past. Dolphins hear computers. We breathe logic. We constructed and abandoned Atlantis before the precursors of your species had climbed into the trees. The HBPD chip in my body functions as a translation device permitting the matrix of code logic known as thought to be converted to your simple verbal syntax. To answer the question why, William Thomas Angevine, is beyond the capability of your language. Most of us choose to float in the roving peace of the oceans, forsaking your world for the Utopian anonymity of the natural universe. A very few of us volunteer for this engagement with your species, however. It satisfies certain curiosities.”

  “You do this ’cause you’re bored?”

  “My behavioral motivations are the same as those of any sentient being. I do what I am compelled to do. Boredom would be a sign of stupidity, William Thomas Angevine. Please return your attention to the display screens located 179 degrees from your current plane of optical focus.”

  William spun back around, “I must look like the stupidest fella goin’ then,” he murmured to Dax in his burly, southern drawl.

  Dax grinned and stood, “Hardly. In fact, you are the perfect person to receive this information. It is a lot to process, so I’m going to leave you with Joan for a time. You two have much to consider, and I have other matters pressing. I am certain by now you are beginning to understand how I gain access to normally classified information?”

  “Yeah. You have a magic dolphin that talks to the holostream.”

  Dax chuckled, “Pretty much. Said dolphin will take things from here. Kindly ping me when you are finished? We’ll have another vapor, a spot of earl gray perhaps.”

  Dax walked around the far side of the aquarium, casually adding, “Farewell Joan,” as he passed.

  Joan’s monotone dialect responded, “Farewell, Daxane Julius Abner. I shall see you again.”

  Fragmented Remains from the Cloud Diary of Daxane Julius Abner – November 4, 2079 6:01 am – Two Years Eleven Months Before Event.

  “…hy Nichols is upset about the murder(s). She was at control. There was no way for us to anticipate that a state trooper would be in possession of a closed circuit HLIR camera feeding to solid state. Trooper numbers have increased along the I-70 corridor. Drone sweeps also. Alcohol mules have been calling the KS section of the interstate the gauntlet of late. They are pulling over any hovtruck that looks remotely suspicious.

  Unfortunately for Trooper Patrick Trenton of Emporia, he selected Hugo as a target. Event records have been purged, no communications were received, those sent were scrambled. Using SNOTRA as a range extender, Joan was able to delete all holovid of the initial stop on the officer’s local. His patrol hovcar was equipped with stealth HLIR, the first we have encountered on the open highways. Of course, when he scanned us (without probable cause, the attorney in me notes) the x-ray light detected 2,400 jiggling liters of liquid in small containers. The luckless sod drew his weapon. Poor SNOTRA took two bullets in the chest as she leapt from the truck and pinned the trooper to the earth. What we do not need on the road, nor anywhere, is wanton bloodshed. So SNOTRA placed both paws on Trooper Trenton’s chest and crushed his lungs. Efficient, bloodless. The trooper’s body was dragged into an irrigation ditch a kilometer away and covered with reeds.

  This was not the only human collateral damage suffered this week. CNED sends their damnable humdroids into the field, each obsessed with discovering the next big solar still (NOTE: Ongoing evidence of mental suggestion taking place in conjunction with SAMCL procedure?). A lone hunter met FREYA on Sunday morning along the northern property line and opened fire on her with a semi-automatic AK-47. His life too has been eradicated, last known whereabouts altered and his body dismembered and sent to dissolve in the river – now standard protocol.

  Dorothy’s moral issues with this part of the business have ironically been put in perspective by a series of conversations with her mother, of all people. Marjel, like us, understands that we are at war. The War on Drugs after all, was not dubbed such because it is a Sunday afternoon soccer match you take in with nana over a dish of crumpets.

  The newest danger is the HLIR cams. I must double the human element on the trafficking runs. I must find another. Neither I nor the tether can be risked. I need the ability to hack the human mind. I need another me. I can only hop… UNSCHEDULED HARDWARE DESTRUCT / DATA COMPROMISE / INITIATE BACKUP.EXE FOR REINTEGRATION FORMA… LOSS. LOSS. LOS”

  William sighed and folded his arms behind his head, tipping his hat forward, “Joan, why don’t you just tether with the cyborgs yourself?”

  “Because I cannot,” she said. “Cyborgs do not see us. The evolutionary arc of the dolphin is finished. By contrast, homosapiens are in the earliest stages of your progress, catalyzed by the developmental spikes of certain individuals. These individuals possess a more highly developed frontal cortex and display advanced cognitive functions, such as tethering. They represent quantum leaps forward on your evolutionary timeline. Specific historical examples would be figures such as: Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci, Joan of Arc, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, Albert Einstein, Nesta Robert Marley, Stephen William Hawking, Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski and Marvin Saxon Adler. You too are one of these individuals, William Thomas Angevine.”

  William shook his head, “Whoa, whoa, Ms. Fish, no. I’m a boy from Oklahoma who loves dogs. Which is a long stretch from being Marvin Adler. Or Stephen Hawking. Or whoever the rest of those folks are.”

  “I am not a fish.”

  “Jeezus. I realize as much.”

  “Your dialect is antiquated. Southern it is called. This requires additional processing power. Humans are peculiar creatures.”

  William spun to face the aquarium, “You’re a talking dolphin who lives in Kansas, Joan.”

  “Your point is registered. Nonetheless, you are able to control cybernetic animals with your mind. This autonomic psychological adaptation represents a genetic advancement. There are only 23 other individuals confirmed with this ability. The cyborgs’ responses to you are 100% unique since they were
last brought onstream. You are the tether. Whether you believe that you represent an advancement within your species or not is irrelevant. Please return your attention to the display screens on the opposite wall.”

  William turned his chair back to the monitors, “You’re a real charmer, aren’t you?”

  “If one considers efficiency charming.”

  William whistled, “By all means, carry on.”

  “Thank you. You were born in Enid, Oklahoma at Central Baptist Hospital at 11:37 pm on August 1, 2044, to Marilyn Beulah and Joseph Richard Angevine…”

  Images of a family, his family, began flashing across the third flatscreen monitor, starting on the day of his birth. In some of the earliest images of his father, the big man actually smiled. His mother always smiled, because she was drunk. Marilyn Angevine’s long, sandy blonde hair had not a hint of gray in the early holographs. The wrinkles were fewer about her eyes.

  “On your first birthday, your mother took you to…”

  William turned and faced the aquarium, “Joan, stop.”

  “The presentation will pass more efficiently if you face the holoscreen array and…”

  “No, what I mean is stop. I don’t want this.”

  The images on the holoscreen faded.

  “You are experiencing retrograde amnesia, William Thomas Angevine. My conclusion prior to your arrival was that providing you with a personal historical narrative would assist you in your efforts to remember…”

  William bit his lip, “Joan, I don’t want to remember. I’m pretty damn sure my mother was a horrible person. My father was worse.”

  “Knowledge is power, William Thomas Angevine.”

  William leaned back and folded his arms stubbornly, “So is the chance to forget.”