Neurolink

by M M Buckner

  Richter went on in a tightly controlled voice. “Relax, guys. The docs can patch my carcass later. With my NP, I’ll live forever.”

  Klas Lorn gave him a thumbs-up and a fawning smile, which clearly annoyed the old man.

  “You guys still don’t get it, do ya?” He waved his bandaged arm. “I was born in 1970, and I look younger than my boy there. I’ve had every organ replaced at least once. But that’s old news. Flesh is optional now, thanks to my NP.”

  This time he’s going to die, Dominic thought. Does he really believe that crap about the NP? Maybe he does. After all, he invented it. The Neural Profile. A new kind of bank account for storing a person’s mind. Dominic pictured the gray box perched on his father’s desk. He’d heard Richter’s sales pitch to investors so many times, he could repeat it by heart.

  “Scientists are fools, boys. They keep trying to upload the human mind to a computer. Any idiot knows you can’t translate brain matter into binary code. My way is easier and cheaper—and more profitable for the bank. We just record a person’s life in real time. Document the memories as they happen, instead of trying to slice-and-dice neurons later. Hell, why not? Our cameras and scanners cover every square centimeter of this hemisphere. Video, audio, email, financial and medical history, employment records, every freakin’ iota. Think of the fee we could charge!

  “Boys, we’re talking a complete digital record of perfect memories, better than real ones because time won’t distort ’em. And we’ll have designer packaging. Every customer gets their own portable safe-deposit box in brushed platinum, branded with the ZahlenBank logo. When a customer dies, we transfer their deposit into a blank AI program inside the Ark. And voila! A high-resolution copy of the customer’s mind rises from the dead.”

  But it’s just a copy, Dominic wanted to shout. The person still dies.

  Yet exactly as Richter predicted, the Neural Profile became ZahlenBank’s hottest product. Hordes of status-conscious executives paid the whopping fee to have their lives documented. Second by second, day after day, ZahlenBank mined their personal data from the Net, hypercompressed it for easy storage and beamed it to their personal safe-deposit boxes, in tasteful platinum gray with the golden ZahlenBank “Z” embossed near the base—a must-have trophy suitable for display on desks or caffie tables.

  As the marketing brochures pointed out, surgeries extended life only a couple of centuries at most—but the Neural Profile guaranteed life everlasting. So far, no NP account holder had died to test the theory. Richter might be the first.

  Now as he shifted in his steel brace, he snickered at the Monday gathering. “I’m 279 years old, and with my NP, I’ll outlive you all!”

  Dominic pressed his hands on the table and took a deep breath through his nose. Father, he wanted to say, call the surgeons. Even the most perfect digital record won’t save you from death. He tried to imagine that blank wall, with nothingness on the other side. Was it possible the old man didn’t believe in death? He made me, Dominic thought. A flesh copy to back up the data copy. He must have doubts. Dominic tried to swallow, but his mouth had gone dry.

  Across the U-shaped table, Klas Lorn whined about their ongoing wrangle with the WTO, and Dominic watched his father’s face. It was a standing joke that Dominic and Richter could have been twins. They shared the same wide jaws and sea-colored eyes, although Richter had been through so many cosmetic fixes, he did look younger than his son. But now his lips were turning blue, and Dominic saw him shiver in his steel brace. Could he be in pain, Dominic wondered. Could the imbecile doctors have left my father in pain? Without realizing it, he clutched the edge of the table.

  Somewhere in the background, a throat cleared. Karel Folger, Dominic’s young assistant, touched his shoulder. The room had gone deathly still. Dominic glanced at his colleagues and realized it was his turn to speak.

  “We can delay this till another time,” he said.

  “What other time?” the old man barked.

  “My report can wait. I suggest—”

  “Nothing can wait!” Richter’s eyes widened to show angry whites all round his irises. He seemed to be straining to stay upright in the brace. A thread of spit trailed from his lower lip, and people at the table shifted to look elsewhere.

  “Tell me now, boy. What about the Nord.Com foreclosure? Be quick. My NP’s recording!”

  He’ll kill himself to update his damned Neural Profile, Dominic thought. Or has he had a premonition? Have the doctors told him he won’t make it?

  Dominic held his expression still. He opened his notebook and glanced around at the cynical faces of his colleagues. He no longer bothered to stand when he addressed them. He didn’t care how they voted. All transactions balance. All statements are true. He couldn’t even gather the energy to laugh.

  Nord.Com was a routine bankruptcy worth less than three billion deutschdollars. Reading aloud from Karel’s brief, he eyed the closed double doors and wondered how far away the surgeons were waiting. Nearby, he hoped. In a flat voice, he recited the list of Nord.Com’s repossessed assets. He’d liquidated everything except for one rusty submarine, a raining ship that crawled along the bottom of the Arctic Sea, the Benthica.

  “It’s a petty cash issue,” he said, “not worth the time of this board.”

  “Don’t tell me what my time is worth!” With a violent effort, Richter hawked phlegm and spat on the floor. Klas Lorn pursed his lips, and most of the others studied their notebooks.

  Dominic read on. A Tortuga-class submarine, the Benthica crawled along the seafloor chewing up rock, extracting mineral deposits and spitting out the slag. The submarine was too old for repairs and should be scrapped. But two thousand protected employees lived aboard, the miners and a large number of nonproductive dependents. Oversupply in the labor market meant their contracts weren’t worth the cost of relocating them. It was all in the numbers. Whatever ZahlenBank did, the Benthica and her crew would cost money.

  “So how do we turn it around?” the old man wheezed. Just then, he began to slip sideways in the brace, and he let out a little cry. Dominic half stood to call for help.

  “Don’t keep me waiting!” the old man wheezed from his crooked new position in the brace. “How do we turn this to our advantage?”

  Dominic leaned with his knuckles on the table, staring at Richter and working his lower jaw. You fool, he wanted to shout. Let the surgeons help you. Why do you sit here concerning yourself with this trivia? What does it matter?

  Then Richter spoke in a tone Dominic had not heard before. Perhaps his injuries constricted his throat. He seemed to be pleading. “Show me what you’re made of, son.”

  Show me what you’re made of? Again, the air caught in Dominic’s lungs. The old man’s eyes leaked tears, and his appallingly youthful head wobbled. Dominic tried to read the message in his watery eyes: Show me what you’re made of?

  “Spin them off,” Karel whispered in Dominic’s ear.

  Yes, the Benthica. Spin them off. Dominic felt Karel’s hand on his shoulder. He sat down and smoothed the wrinkles from his suit to calm himself. Last night with Karel and Elsa, Dominic had joked about simply handing the Benthica to the miners. Spin them off. Set the protes free, and let them fend for themselves. The solution would save ZahlenBank a couple million deutschdollars. Of course it might be a death sentence for the protes. They weren’t equipped to take care of themselves. Dominic didn’t mean it seriously.

  But earnest Elsa had taken his words at face value. Freed protes would have no legal status, she pointed out, and no access to the markets. Without fuel and supplies, their life support would rapidly fail. On the other hand, Karel loved the idea. Karel called it an innovative experiment. Spin them off.

  Now under the beseeching eyes of his father, Dominic spoke the words aloud.

  “Whas ’at?” The old man slipped lower in his brace, leering and slurring his words. “Spin ’em off, d’you say?”

  As Dominic explained the unprecedented idea of freeing protes
and giving them a ship, the old man’s smile grew wide. He positively smacked his lips. It struck Dominic then, like balm to an aching wound, that he had made his father proud.

  The old man reached for the gavel, and his mouth quivered. “It’ll save us two million bucks? I like it. Vote now.” But his arm went limp again. He couldn’t grip the gavel. With a gentle grunt, Richter Jedes fell across the U-shaped table and bled.

  CHAPTER 2

  * * *

  PAYABLE ON DEMAND

  “LET’S get something straight, son.”

  “Don’t call me that.”

  “But, Dominic, you are my son. Didn’t I raise you from an infant? You’re my boy,” said the gray box on the desk.

  Dominic’s nostrils flared. Despite his determination not to react, he tugged at his collar.

  His father had died three weeks ago. Richter Jedes, master banker, dead from a ruptured spleen. Newscasters called it “inconceivable!” Pundits declared the end of an era. When the bank’s share value slipped, the board rushed to name Dominic president. Continuity of leadership, they proclaimed. Still, the stock price wobbled.

  This morning, his father’s office felt hot and close. With deliberate calm, he slipped a cybernail onto his right index finger and tested its sharp stylus point with his thumb. Then he whispered a command to the Net node on his wrist. A cluster of holograms shimmered above his forearm, and he ticked through them with the cybernail, closing some, linking to others, hoping the news had changed. He was stalling. He couldn’t face the gray box perched on his father’s desk.

  “Do you still feel some quarrel between us?” the Neural Profile asked. “We’re partners, boy. We have to forget our differences.”

  Dominic wanted to crush the gray box in his hands. Partners? With an artificial brain masquerading as his father? A vein pulsed visibly in his forehead. He stared out the window at the smog. June. Start of the scorching season.

  After his father died, Dominic had cloistered himself in his home office, spending hours in video conference, spinning positive news bytes to stock analysts and mediacasters. He slept in fits and ate too much and let Elsa camouflage the shadows under his eyes with rosy makeup. Karel fed him caffie and throat spray so he could keep talking, and slowly, the bank’s stock regained its value. A business crisis he could manage, but what he couldn’t control was the hollow rage that burned inside him now.

  “Think what a team we’ll make!” said the NP.

  Dominic jammed his fists deep in his pockets and twisted the linings. For three weeks, he had not set foot in his father’s office, the office the gray box had commandeered. Not until this morning.

  But this morning! This morning, everything changed. Events broke in and demolished his careful damage control. One idiotic mistake. Such a trivial thing. He must have been blind not to see what it meant. All he wanted was to close his eyes and pretend it had never happened. But this morning, his blunder was flashing across the Net, and his name headlined every news page. Worse, ZahlenBank’s stock price had veered from recovery to free fall. He was mortified. His only relief was that Richter hadn’t lived to see it. As he stood in his father’s office, the very air smelled bankrupt.

  “You need my help to fix this.” The NP spoke in such a perfect reproduction of Richter’s voice that Dominic almost shivered. “You can’t afford to turn your back on me, son. This is too big.”

  A grimy plume of soot gusted against the window at eye level. Dominic watched it eddy in a slow spiral and dissolve into the ochre atmosphere.

  “We’re execs,” the NP continued. “We haven’t always agreed about things, but we’re duty-bound to protect the bank. It’s our sacred trust. Without ZahlenBank, this shit-heap planet would fall apart.”

  Dominic tapped the window with his cybernail. He didn’t often think about his steamy, overcrowded planet. He preferred not to dwell on the 12 billion people crowded in underground warrens to escape Earth’s foul atmosphere. And he avoided noticing how they moved closer to the poles every year because global warming had turned the tropics to cauldrons. But now, images of queues came to his mind unbidden. Down in the grim lower levels of Trondheim, hundreds of thousands of protes jammed the tunnels each day, patiently waiting for rations of food, uniforms and antiviral tabs. ZahlenBank’s cameras watched them and recorded their words. And nothing else held them in line but their habit of following rules.

  The genie in the gray box spoke in a confiding whisper. “We’re on the edge, son. Things could fall apart.”

  “I know,” Dominic said.

  “Son, it’s a noble thing we do. The protes need us. Can you conceive the total fucking horror if we left them to themselves? Looting, plague, starvation—cannibalism for all we know.”

  Dominic leaned his forehead against the window and imagined he could feel heat seeping in from the greenhouse clouds outside. But that was an illusion. The glass was too thick.

  “ZahlenBank’s the heart, son. We pump the money and data through the Net. We fuel the markets, and the markets feed everyone.” The NP paused for effect, exactly the way Richter would have done. “We can’t let ZahlenBank collapse. We have an obligation.”

  “Yes, F—” Dominic almost said father.

  “We have to fix your fuck-up.”

  Dominic’s breath fogged the window. “The Benthica.”

  “The Benthica” echoed the NP.

  The vein in Dominic’s forehead throbbed again. Almost as a joke, he had suggested that spin-off. One rusty mining submarine. Two thousand protes. Cut them loose, and let them fend for themselves. Save the relocation expense. A careless joke, yet it pleased his dying father. The board cast its vote, and in the muddled days that followed, Dominic arranged the spin-off with little further thought It was a piece of minutia on a foreclosure sheet. Who could predict it would cause such an uproar?

  Thirteen days ago, the Benthica vanished from their satellite scans, and for the last seventeen hours, the freed miners had been broadcasting a message inviting employees around the world to run away and join them. Their signal ricocheted back and forth through so many intermediate servers and reproduced itself in so many echoes and harmonic reiterations that no one could trace its source. But every prote in the northern hemisphere could pick it up on the Net. And the markets were panicking.

  Dominic leaned against the window and ground his teeth. He should have modeled the probabilities and run a projection. He should have foreseen the incompetence of those protes. They wanted to turn the fragile order upside down.

  Their invitation was nonsense. Those miners had no extra room aboard their ship to accommodate strangers, much less food or air. What’s more, they didn’t dare give away their location. Without coordinates, other protes would never find one small submarine hidden deep in the Arctic Sea. So far, for some inexplicable reason, ZahlenBank’s own satellites couldn’t find it. Still, a trickle of employees had begun to desert, and late last night the World Trade Organization filed suit against ZahlenBank for destabilizing the markets. Dominic’s mistake might have given the Orgs the wedge they needed to break ZahlenBank apart.

  Early this morning, as expected, the Orgs tendered a settlement offer. Their only goal, so they claimed, was to restore market order, and if ZahlenBank would cooperate, they would drop the suit. The deal was, Dominic Jedes had to personally board the ship and negotiate a secret resolution with the miners.

  “We’ll have to accept the WTO’s offer,” the NP said.

  Dominic stared at the box. “Are you serious? Make a secret deal with protes? It’s a charade.”

  “Of course it’s a charade. We’ll never bargain with protes. Give ’em a millimeter, they’ll want a scuzzin’ light-year. Just the thought of it gives me a migraine.” r Dominic moved away from the window and straightened his jacket. “I can’t figure the Orgs. Why the secrecy? And why do they want me personally involved?”

  “You’re the best damn negotiator in the world, boy!”

  “I don’t buy that reason.
” Dominic brushed at his sleeve and frowned.

  “Their agenda’s always the same. They wanna screw us!” said the NP. “The point is, they’ll lead us to the Benthica. We have to find that ship and stop the broadcast before it sends the markets over a cliff.”

  Dominic scowled. “Why won’t they make a public announcement? The secrecy bothers me. They expect me to travel incognito.”

  “Son, you’re not exactly a hero with these miners. Maybe the Orgs want to protect you from attack.”

  Dominic thought this over, unconsciously working his jaw.

  “I’ll be with you every second,” the NP went on. “Just play dumb and let them lead you to the Benthica. Then smash the miners’ Net link and kill that broadcast. I’ll send bank guards to get you out. You’ll be home in a few hours.”

  “We’ll have to arrest the miners,” Dominic said thoughtfully. “Otherwise, they might find a way to start broadcasting again.”

  “Sure. We’ll arrest the buggers.”

  Dominic had studied the Orgs’ lawsuit backwards and forwards. What the NP said made sense. He rubbed his chin and frowned. “Arresting two thousand people will be expensive. But it’s a solution. Once that broadcast ends, the Orgs have no grounds to sue us.”

  “Fuckin’ right.” The NP chuckled. “I’ll handle the intel. You do the physical stuff.”

  Dominic closed his fists. “I see. You’re the brains. I’m the muscle.”

  “Imagine how powerful we’ll be, once this little screwup’s behind us,” said the gray box. “We’ll lead the Orgs in circles. They’re just computers. Whereas we, we’ve got a one-two combination. Megagenius, plus hairy human balls! Son, there’s never been a partnership like ours before.”

  Dominic glared at the gray box and held himself very, very still. Partners? You want me to be your flesh flunky! He didn’t say the words aloud. Only his jaw moved, just perceptibly, from side to side. If the NP had spoken at mat moment, Dominic might have shattered that box with his fist.