Prison of Souls (Science Fiction Thriller)

by Xander Gray

  “A what?” I stared at her, unblinking.

  “A Cap Gruss,” she said slowly, “but it’s not like Pyxis sent me an audio tape to confirm the correct pronunciation.”

  “How do you spell it?”

  She placed deliberate emphasis on each letter, as if conversing with a kindergartener.

  “Is that an acronym?” I shook my head. “What does it mean?”

  “I don’t know if it’s an acronym. It doesn’t matter.” She took deep breaths to calm herself. “I’ve been reading Pyxis’ ramblings for days. It’s not easy to explain. I thought he was insane, but your face…”

  I had heard some strange theories from Crystal over the years, but this was quickly becoming the strangest. “You’re not making sense.”

  She swept up the papers from the dashboard. “How do I explain this?” Her eyes darted around the car. When next she spoke, her voice was low and steady, a forced calm. “Okay, let’s step back. When you were eight, McSorley was a third year professor at Walton, working on a research grant from a company called Nexus. If Pyxis is to be believed, Nexus had already developed the most advanced computer technology in the world—technology that would eventually seed the rapid micro-processor advances in the consumer market during the 1990s.”

  I palmed my forehead and leaned toward the door handle, suddenly feeling sick. “This Pyxis character told you this?”

  “Yes. It’s all in here.” She shook the manuscript. “McSorley was making great strides in modeling the human brain, so Nexus wrote him a check and invited him into their lab, where he developed the ability to copy a person’s mind—every cell and synapse, their actual consciousness—into digital form. Nexus called it mind upload technology. The process described in these papers is beyond science fiction. And that's what I thought it was, until I saw your face.”

  “My face.” I remembered my reflection in the bathroom mirror, my eyes sliding down my face in pools of liquid flesh. I was going to pass out.

  Crystal kept talking. “For some reason, McSorley used little kids as test subjects. Every synapse and brain cell was replaced by tiny microscopic synthetics, one at a time over a period of weeks, until eventually their entire brains had been replaced inside their skulls, and they didn’t even know.”

  This sounded absurd.

  Crystal flipped through the stack of papers until she found a photograph of a syringe full of gray liquid. “McSorley injected the kids with millions of synthetic cells. Intelligent cells. They attached themselves to the brain structures responsible for basic life support and began a process known as Replicate and Replace.” She revealed another photograph, this one showing a cloud of smoke escaping a silver box.

  I nearly hyperventilated, bracing against the dash. “What is that?”

  “Millions of synthetic cells designed to replicate the human consciousness.”

  “What are you saying?”

  Crystal revealed another photograph, a color 8x10 of a human brain sitting on a stainless steel table. “You see this?”

  Compared to the last two, the picture did not impress me.

  Crystal shook her head. “Look closer. I spent hours looking at pictures of brains. Sometimes they are pink or red. Sometimes they are brown or gray. None of them look like this. This brain is bright purple.”

  “Are you sure that’s not just bad color balance?”

  “The synthetic proteins are purple.”

  I leaned into the dashboard, the view of trees beyond the windshield spinning.

  Crystal picked through the pages and began reading aloud. “When presented with a host such as a Capgras, an immortality grid, or an artificial reality grid, the consciousness disincorporates and swarms as billions of individual synthetic cells toward the host.”

  “Wait, you’re saying the brains of these test subjects can turn into dust and leave their bodies through their ears or something?”

  “Sinus cavities, ears, and eyes.” She paused. “But yes. They call it swarming.”

  The world filled with fog, and I fainted.

  #

  I woke with my head against the passenger window. Outside, a highway mile marker flashed past.

  Crystal noticed me stirring. “Have a hallucination?”

  “No.” A bolt of panic shot through me, and I sat up. “I went to Slaven’s house and found a box containing ID badges—”

  “I got them,” Crystal interjected. “I also made some phone calls. You have not been reported missing from the prison.” Crystal guided the car around a pickup clogging the fast lane. “Based on everything we’ve learned, I’d say that means your body is still at the prison.”

  “That’s insane.”

  “It’s true.” Crystal spared a quick glance at me.

  “Listen to yourself.” I shook my head. “How could my body be in the prison?”

  She grabbed the photo of the faceless humanoid. “Weren't you listening? This thing is called a Capgras. It’s a prosthetic body.”

  “I have no idea what a Capgras is.” I snatched the photo and threw it into the back seat.

  “You’d better get an idea,” Crystal snapped. “We don't know how long you can stay in that thing. Pyxis refers to it repeatedly as a temporary host. I know this is a lot to take in, but if you don’t start taking this seriously, you might die in there.”

  “Die in where?”

  She thumped two fingers on my chest, her eyes still on the road. “In there.”

  “In the Capgras,” I said.

  “Yes.” Crystal swerved into the fast lane to pass a semi. “According to Pyxis, Nexus developed the Capgras as an espionage tool, but also as a host for something he calls a disincorporated consciousness.”

  The ridiculousness of Crystal’s claims overcame me. “You’re telling me I’ve got a synthetic brain? That my brain turned into smoke, left my body, and entered a prosthetic body? Is that what you’re saying?”

  Crystal kept her eyes on the road. “I know it sounds crazy—”

  “Sounds crazy?” I had heard enough. “If the faceless monster from that photograph is a prosthetic body, why have I seen it in hallucinations my whole life?”

  “Pyxis said they had one at McSorley’s lab.”

  Suddenly claustrophobic, I rolled down the passenger window and sucked in air to get myself under control. “You’re saying if my mind had been loaded into one of these things, I could look like anyone?”

  “That’s the idea.”

  “You know how this sounds?”

  “That thing you did with your face.” Crystal glared at me. “You know how that looked?”

  Her frustrated expression brought me back to reality. She loved me. She wanted desperately to help me. I found myself fixating on the lines of her face, her cheekbones and forehead, her lovely neck. Something opened in the back of my mind.

  She gasped and the car swerved, slamming me into the door. We skidded to a halt on the shoulder.

  Crystal stared at me like she had seen a ghost. “Did you do that consciously?”

  I flipped the rearview toward me and looked at my reflection. “I look just like you.” The look of horror on my wife’s face was almost comical. Almost.

  “Holy shit.” A semi roared by less than a foot from her car door, but she didn’t blink. She touched my face, then snatched her hand away. “You’ve got to change back. Can you change back?”

  “I can try.” I concentrated, the face in the mirror morphed back into my own, and the thrill of discovery raced through me. I could control it.

  “Holy shit, you’re going to be rich,” Crystal said. “This is amazing.”

  I couldn’t believe she was talking about money. “You’re suggesting I write a book?”

  “Hell no. This kind of thing needs video.”

  “Are you out of your mind?” She was smarter than this. “I can’t go public.”

  “We could hide you in plain sight.” She still had that crazed look. “You could transform into anyone.”

 
“You don’t think whoever created this technology can detect it?” It was a simple question, but it brought Crystal back to reality.

  “No, you’re right. You’re right.” She sounded like she was trying to convince herself.

  I was a phantom brain in a borrowed body. The ramifications settled into me. “Am I even human?”

  “You’re body’s not human. I think we can agree on that. But that’s temporary.”

  “Never mind my body.” My stomach turned. “What about me? My consciousness? Didn’t you say my brain was synthetic?”

  “I don’t think that makes your consciousness synthetic. You're still you.”

  “Hon.” I touched her on the shoulder. “My brain is artificial.”

  “I never said I wasn’t freaked.” She touched my face again. This time her fingers lingered. “But apparently it’s been artificial since you were eight. If it’s okay with you, I’m going to think of you as the same old Joshua Briar you’ve been since I met you.”

  “I can’t stay in this thing.” Given time to adjust, I might eventually tolerate the idea of synthetic brain tissue—hard to imagine as that was—but not having a single human cell? “I need my real body.”

  “You want I should drop you off at the prison?”

  “No.”

  “Good, because I’ve got a better idea.” She pulled a stack of driver’s licenses, bound with a rubber band, from the dash and dropped them into my lap. “Those are the licenses from the box you found at Slaven's. While you were out, my secretary confirmed all three work at Walt U.” She pulled Pyxis’ file from her briefcase and handed it to me. “That came in an envelope postmarked near the university. Want to bet Pyxis works there?”

  She wanted me to masquerade as one of the professors to identify our mole. “I’m not a spy.”

  “I’ll help with the spying.”

  “What do you know about spying?”

  Crystal laughed. “I’m a lawyer.”

  I laughed too. It felt good. Normal. When it stopped, I told her about everything: the old death row, the cloud of smoke erupting from the silver box, the way my doppelganger had stumbled after me in the dark. When I told her I was being hunted—that Slaven would come for me—she hit the gas and merged into traffic.

  Chapter

  Sixteen

  Crystal got us a third-floor room at a rambling Victorian hotel. Our window overlooked the university, where students with swinging book bags milled between seventies-era brick buildings.

  While Crystal showered, I stared out at the place where my life had changed. I had formed a grim mental picture of Walt U during the trial, but it was just a normal university campus—not the sort of place that inspired ruminations of murder or high-stakes frame jobs.

  I closed the curtain and turned my attention to the driver’s license in my hand. The photo showed a portly man in his mid-50s, with glasses and scrubby facial hair, by the name of Quentin Navarez.

  I concentrated on the photo, the hair and eyes, the lines around the mouth.

  When I felt my face change, I glanced at the mirror. My face was melting. Then the world darkened, and I knew my eyes had vanished.

  I wanted to scream, but I had no mouth. I fell forward, bracing blindly against the desk.

  I scrambled to focus on my own face. The world snapped back into focus. My own reflection gazed back from the mirror.

  The problem was the picture. It was flat and low resolution; a poor substitute for meeting Quentin Navarez in the flesh. I didn’t know what he looked like from the side or back, and when I transformed, I could feel my blind spots rippling like quantum foam.

  Disgusted, I threw the license onto the table. This was not working.

  Crystal had stepped out of the bathroom, wrapped in a towel. She watched my face in the mirror. “I’ll never get used to that.”

  “How do you think it feels from my perspective?”

  She put her arms around me. I felt the shape of her body and pushed her away, ashamed. “What happened to the normal world?”

  “You mean the normal where you’re in prison?”

  “I mean the normal where people do not wake up in prosthetic bodies and brains do not swarm as clouds of purple dust.”

  Crystal sat on the edge of the bed. “We’ll fix this.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know.” She turned down the sheets. “But I feel something big coming.”

  “A room at Bellevue?” I collapsed in a chair and swiveled toward the window. “I can’t become Quentin Navarez or any of these other guys unless I meet them, and even then I can’t make promises.”

  “I know.” She slid between the covers. “We’ll have to arrange a meet and greet. That’s different from what I was thinking, but I can make it happen. Go to bed. I’ll make phone calls in the morning.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  I waited until she was snoring, then stepped into the hallway and eased the door shut behind me. Moments later I pushed into the cool night air of a normal world.

  Here, reality existed as one would expect. The sidewalk was unchanging concrete. The people were flesh and bone. The moths were organic, the same as they'd been for eons. They buzzed around the street lamps oblivious to the abomination trying to pass for human below.

  I paused outside a restaurant with red awnings at the end of the block. I knew if I stared hard enough at the window, I could turn my reflection into a mass of squirming flesh. In the moment before my eyes melted, I would see the faceless creature clawing up from my nightmares—finally come to claim me from inside.

  I crossed the street and trekked up the hill toward the campus. It was a strenuous climb—bare grass and scraggly pines—but my heart rate kept steady. When I noticed this, though, it suddenly doubled.

  Had it changed just to keep up appearances? To placate my mind?

  Was anything about this body real?

  At the top of the hill I found most of the students gone for the night. Lights burned in a few lamp posts, but the buildings stood silent. I took an aggregate pathway to the courtyard where Helena had died. It seemed innocuous, here in the dark—just another empty space in a deserted campus.

  I wanted to lie on the aggregate and soak into the weed-clogged cracks. I wanted to abandon this madness, as reality had abandoned me. If someone is watching, come get me. Come get me and let’s give the police a real reason to arrest me.

  But the bravado rang false. Yes, maybe the only true part of me left was my consciousness, an intangible ether bound in a prison of artificial synapses. But if I could stay alive—if I could talk to Pyxis—maybe I could shed my past and all the pain of life behind bars. Maybe I could retire to a secluded farm like my Grandma’s, a farm no cop would ever search.

  I wanted to hold my wife, to bury my face in her hair and cry away the confusion and madness. But I couldn’t hold her the way I wanted, not in this alien… thing. I made a vow: when I next pressed my flesh to hers, it would be my flesh. When I ran my fingers down the small of her back, I would feel her shiver with my fingers. I would not touch her with this abomination.

  I covered my face. My tears tasted of salt, but were they real? I had left a prison of steel and fallen into one of synthetic tissue.

  I let the fake tears stream down my cheeks and stared up into the lights, thinking of Crystal.

  Chapter Eighteen

  When I woke the next morning, Crystal was pacing around the hotel room with her cell to her ear. She ended the call and plopped into the rolling chair, fuming, then tossed the bundle of licenses onto the bed. “None of them will meet with us.”

  I sat up and rubbed my eyes. “Aren’t they professors?”

  “Yes, but only one of the three is teaching classes this semester.”

  I got out of bed. “Does he have office hours?”

  “I have no idea.” Intuition flashed in her eyes. “But I could have Eleanor check.”

  Good old Eleanor—the secretary at Forester Law who got away with making catty c
omments about my wife’s wardrobe because she was dating one of the partners. “You still haven’t gotten that girl fired?”

  A grin broke across Crystal's face. It almost made me forget the preposterousness of our situation. “Didn’t I tell you? She’s marrying the boss next April.”

  “That’s a shame. I hadn’t seen anyone make such a bad first impression on you since my sweater-clutching incident in the high school library.”

  “Tenth grade.” For a moment, she seemed far away. “That little incident landed you a wife, buddy.”

  “What was it I said to you?”

  “Oh my God.” Crystal rolled her eyes. “I will never forget it as long as I live. You said time was a broken line. What does that even mean?”

  “I have no idea.”

  Crystal retrieved the licenses and thumbed through them, shaking her head. “Ah well. We don’t have time for memory lane.”

  “Why don’t I see if I can morph into McSorley? At least I know what he looks like from something other than a half-inch photo.”

  “I told you, McSorley is missing. Impersonating him would attract attention.”

  “Then who do I impersonate?” I looked at my reflection.

  “The one you’ve practiced on. Professor Navarez.”

  “I’ll need more practice.”

  “Yep.” Crystal stood from the chair. “I got you some clothes from the store across the street while you were sleeping. Put them on. You can’t walk around in Slaven’s uniform anymore.”

  A pair of khakis and a dress shirt with blue pinstripes sat on the edge of the bed. I put them on. The shirt proved loose through the chest and long in the sleeves, and the pants had to be cinched, but it didn’t look like I was wearing clown clothes anymore. “Not a bad fit.”

  “I got you a few other things.” She pointed to a shopping bag by the nightstand.

  I dumped its contents onto the bed: a pair of sunglasses, a baseball cap, and two notebooks. I looked at her questioningly.

  “Inconspicuous student attire.” Crystal grabbed her keys from the nightstand. “Let’s go.”