Neurolink

by M M Buckner

  For some reason, an image of Tooksook popped into his mind, grinning like a fool and cutting those stale chocolate bars into thirty-eight tiny pieces so everyone in the colony got a treat. The picture was so ludicrous, a half-blind old man sawing away at candy bars with a plastic knife. Not impossible. A matter of division.

  Dominic parted his lips. Silently he repeated his father’s words: “There’s no such thing as a simple deal.” Somewhere inside him, a savvy negotiator came wide-awake, and he got an idea.

  He turned to the hologram and gestured. “Let’s break this down. You want to control ZahlenBank. I want to finance the miners.” He sensed the NP trying to object, so he raised his hand. “Hear me out. I’ve already agreed to merge with you, but you say that’s not enough. What if I add a sweetener to the deal?”

  “Sweetener? Go on. I’m listening.”

  Dominic rocked on his heels and smiled. “You need your directors and shareholders to trust you. Well, I can make them love you. With my help, you can give them the one thing they want most—the one thing Richter tried to do for decades and never could.”

  “Beat the Orgs’ lawsuit!”

  “Correct. Stop the divestiture and keep ZahlenBank intact for good.” Dominic rubbed his eye, and briefly the duplicated world slid together. “Give your investors that, and you own them. I’ll merge with you and help you do it.”

  “I see your little scheme. Hell no! We’d be ruined!”

  “I haven’t explained yet.”

  “You wanna start up a new bank!”

  “How did you know that?” said Dominic.

  “Talk about bad precedents. You’re toying to con me, boy.” Then the NP snickered. “Fuck, it just might work.”

  Dominic frowned. “Have you invented some way to read my thoughts?”

  “Yeah, I have.” The NP snickered again and tapped the left side of its head. “We’re already merged. Have been for an hour. Your fancy new eyepiece, it’s a little design of my own.”

  “This came from you?” Dominic covered the artificial eye with his hand. He should have known. Runaways couldn’t afford that kind of expense.

  “Direct interface,” the genie said. “I’ve invented a way to browse your real-time cognition? Call it my bit-brain style of empathy.”

  The NP’s hologram flickered and went inert, frozen on standby mode with an inane smile plastered across its square open face. Dominic flinched when the voice vibrated inside his eye. “Your circuits are wet, boy. Stringy and wet. I don’t like wet.”

  The new eye felt warmer than before. With a shudder, he imagined the NP roaming at will through his private thoughts. A spasm pulsed through his cheek, his neck muscle cramped, and the scarred left side of his face itched like a rash. How long, he wondered, before his identity began to submerge in the genie’s vast sea of data?

  He gripped the table edge and drew a sharp breath. No time to waste. He had to close this deal.

  “At least you understand my idea,” he said. “If a competing bank starts up in this hemisphere, ZahlenBank no longer holds a monopoly. And by law, the WTO can’t force our breakup. Case closed. You win.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I’m already there,” the NP said. “But you wanna bring in the fuckin’ miners. That’s nuts!”

  “That’s the key that makes it work.” Dominic paced with nervous energy, twisting his hands in his pockets. “This new bank has to belong to total outsiders with no connection to ZahlenBank. Otherwise, the WTO will smell collusion.”

  “Fuckin’ Orgs.”

  “Exactly.” Dominic paced back and forth, remembering the vibrant confusion of the matching hall. He went on eagerly, “You need me to make this happen, NP. I know the miners. I can convince them to start a bank.”

  His artificial eye pulsed with sarcastic laughter. “A prote bank. That is so pathetic.”

  “It’ll stop the lawsuit,” Dominic said. “That’s what counts. You’ll win your case, and the investors will love you.”

  “So you say.”

  “You know it’s true. You’ll get everything you want. Me. The bank. Total control. And you’ll even make a decent profit on the miners’ loan.”

  “It might work.”

  “Is that a yes?”

  “Awright, awright. Yeah, I like it. You want a handshake, too?”

  Dominic rubbed his damp palms together and moistened his lips. Now the important part was coming. He had to do this perfectly. “Before we ink the contract, there’s one more thing.”

  “You want more!” The NP’s voice exploded like wildfire. “Don’t push me, boy.”

  Dominic’s shoulder muscles tensed. He gripped the in-sides of his pockets and forced himself to breathe. “Look, you’re getting free access to my every thought. How long will it take to figure me out? You’re a mega-genius.”

  “Don’t try to flatter me. I wrote the book.”

  Dominic consciously relaxed his arms at his sides. When he spoke next, it was with the firm assurance of a master banker. “One year. I’ll be your bonded slave for one year, then I want out. You’re a quick study. That should be enough.”

  “Lifetime contract or nothing!” the NP barked.

  “Think about it.” Dominic modulated his voice to a confiding murmur. “I’ll help you beat the Orgs. You’ll humiliate those S.O.B.s. You’ll make them eat your dust.” Dominic paused dramatically, then lowered his voice to a whisper. “What’s that worth to you?”

  No answer.

  Dominic rushed to the window and peered at his reflection to see what was happening in his eye. The dark iris gleamed. He blinked his mutilated eyelid and thought of Qi’s narrow back running away from him. He wanted to hold her again, to whisper the words he couldn’t say before. There was so much he wanted. He had to take this to the end.

  “One year,” he said to his image in the glass. “That’s my final offer.”

  “You’re lying, boy. I’m browsing your thoughts, remember? You care too much about those idiot miners. You’ll do anything for ’em. You’ll give me your whole life.”

  “But I’ll hate you,” Dominic blurted. Then he dropped into one of the heavy chairs and groaned. He’d run out of arguments. His bargaining ploys were exhausted. Benito, Tooksook, Ane Zaki, they were all running away from him. He watched them recede in the distance. Qi’s blue-black hair swung between her shoulder blades as she sprinted away. One last deal—and he couldn’t close it.

  “Yes, I’ll do anything,” he surrendered. “You can have my whole life.” Then he shut his eyes. He’d lost her.

  At last, the voice in his head rumbled, “Okay. I get the picture.”

  CHAPTER 25

  * * *

  FUTURES

  “NICK. N-I-C-K. Try to say it.” Dominic mouthed the word elaborately. “N-n-n-nick.”

  Benito grinned. His black eyes gleamed with mischief as if he were relishing a secret joke. He said nothing.

  They sat on the flotation collar around the ZahlenBank van, kicking their bare legs in the warm, late-summer waves of the Arctic. Both of them knew this moment couldn’t last. As the breeze ruffled Dominic’s wet, curly beard and the sea fluid dried on his chest, he gazed up at the smog and waved. Somewhere overhead, the NP watched through a lens.

  “How about another swim before we go?” he asked the boy.

  They stood together and dove into the oily gray sea. Side by side they swam, one turn out and back. He paddled slowly so the boy could keep up, and they splashed each other and ducked their heads to wash foamy scum off their faces. When they scrambled back onto the rubbery inflated collar, Dominic lay on his side and gazed at the horizon.

  “Look at that, Benito. The sunset.”

  He pointed west, where blood-colored clouds opened like wounds. This might be the last time they would see a sunset together with naked eyes. In a few minutes, Benito would have to get in line with the others and go through cell hygiene.

  The mining colonists had been cycling through ZahlenBank’s fleet of medical vans
for the past seven days—all part of Dominic’s new contract with the NP. Now Benito’s turn had come. Soon he would sit in the folding chair and lay his little arm on the padded rest, and the automated doc would inject molecule-size robots into his veins. While he sipped a sweet drink and watched videos, the cleaning robots would spread through his tissues and eradicate every trace of environmental toxin. Cell hygiene would wash him clean, and his flesh would be whole again. After that, he would not be allowed outside without a surfsuit.

  Dominic puffed up his cheeks and blew, and Benito did the same. They got to their feet on the slippery flotation collar, took one last look at the scarlet clouds, then stepped together into the airlock. Ane Zaki was waiting inside the van. She sat with her feet tucked under her chair, sipping tea. Goose bumps stippled her pale arms, and a cotton ball was taped inside her elbow where the needle had gone.

  “This cell hygiene makes you chilly.” She shivered and smiled. “Like an ice bath.”

  Benito climbed into her lap, and she cuddled him.

  “We could use a bath. Couldn’t we, boy?” Dominic lifted Benito and placed him in a vacant chair. Together, they watched the automated doc shine a purple light to sterilize the boy’s skin for the injection.

  “What do you think of Änderungen?” the NP’s voice hummed inside Dominic’s artificial eye.

  Dominic grimaced and subvocalized, “In what context?”

  “I’ve been trying out names. It has a nice ring, don’t you think? Änderungen. I’m sick of people calling me NP. That’s not a fuckin’ name. It’s a product description.”

  “Does it matter?” Dominic showed Benito how to palm a coin and make it vanish and reappear. He wanted to distract the boy from the auto-doc’s needle.

  “Everybody deserves their own name,” said the genie. “From now on, call me Änderungen.”

  “You’re in a good mood. Let me guess. The Orgs settled.” Dominic handed Benito the coin.

  “Hell yes! We won, boy! I got the call just now. The court approved the miners’ new bank charter and dismissed the lawsuit. And you’ll love this, the Orgs have to eat fifty years’ worth of court costs. Those wet-heads must be blowin’ their circuits.”

  Benito waved his empty hands—he’d made the coin vanish! The boy was quick at learning. He pretended to find the coin in Dominic’s belly button.

  Dominic laughed and ruffled Benito’s hair. Then he gazed out the van’s side window, where a ZahlenBank air-car was just landing in the gray waves. “So it’s done,” he subvocalized. He’d gotten used to forming silent words at the back of his throat. It came naturally now.

  “We have to be in Nome in one hour to dot the i’s and sign the documents. Your transportation’s waiting. Don’t be late.”

  Dominic felt no sense of victory, no elation now that he’d finally won his father’s long battle. His vision was clear. The double images had stopped troubling him. Already, smart nanoquans were migrating from his new artificial eye and healing the scarred tissue around his socket. The dark iris has changed color, too. Now it matched his other one perfectly. Sea gray, the classic Jedes’ trait. The nanoquans had cured his skin rash, too. Dominic suspected the ’quans were performing other tasks as well, like smoothing his wrinkles and lifting the loose flesh under his chin. Jedes’ vanity, he couldn’t escape it.

  One more thing the ’quans would do. After one year, they would dissolve and wash away in his bloodstream. One year, that was the length of his merger contract. The NP had made that concession. In the end, the genie decided a friendly takeover would serve its interests better than a hostile one. Or maybe the NP was already learning how to revise itself. For one year, it would ride along inside Dominic’s head, observe his every thought and act, and try to discover what process he used to invent himself from one moment to the next. One year, and then Dominic would be a free man again. Would the genie honor its promise? It was up to Dominic to teach it how.

  For now, he turned to Ane Zaki, who’d been quietly watching him play with Benito. A faint pink blush had returned to her cheeks, along with her air of benevolent calm. The cell hygiene had restored her health, and somewhere deep below them, her power plant whirred with renewed vigor, pumping currents of energy to illuminate the mining town spreading beneath the sea. Ane Zaki tilted her head and smiled.

  “The major still won’t see me,” he said.

  A touch of melancholy softened Ane Zaki’s smile, and she slowly shook her head. “Qi is busy with her duties in the hospital.”

  “She despises me,” Dominic said.

  “No,” said Ane Zaki.

  “Aw, not this sentimental crap again.” The NP sighed. “I’m too old for this shit. I’m loggin’ out for a while.”

  Dominic felt an acute physical drain when the NP withdrew its presence. He was chagrined to find how accustomed he’d grown in just a few weeks to the genie’s constant companionship. For once he had privacy—and he felt abandoned. Those nanoquans were feeding him some addictive drug, surely. Or maybe he was just weak—the kind of man who would always need someone.

  “What if I go to the hospital and demand to see her?” he asked Ane Zaki.

  The lady electrician shook her head again. As she gazed at him, her mild Asian eyes caught the light. They were like Qi’s eyes, but not the same. “You’ve said good-bye, Nick. Don’t disturb her again.”

  He nodded, knowing she was right and at the same time wanting one more chance to explain himself.

  “Juanita Inez needs a word with you.”

  “Juanita?” Dominic wondered what the old grandmother could want. He’d given her enough money to set up her grandchildren for life.

  “She’s waiting for you in the bathysphere.”

  Through the window, Dominic saw the rusty, dented shuttle bobbing in the waves beside the sleek ZahlenBank car the NP had sent for him. The bathysphere’s small round hatch gaped open, and a rickety ladder had been lowered into the water.

  One more leave-taking. Juanita probably wanted to thank him again. This final trip to the colony saddened him more man he had expected. He’d already said his good-byes to Tooksook and the council, and he’d given Massoud ample advice about how to organize the new bank. They’d structured it along the lines of a mutual credit union, and Dominic even helped design the new nickel-plated coins. He also helped Massoud place ads on the Net. Naturally, the new bank would invite everyone.

  The NP didn’t take the new bank seriously, but Dominic did—because he’d seen the energy of the matching hall. He’d witnessed the colonists building their town from the castoff rubbish of North America, and he’d recognized the promise. Once he had dreamed of being part of it.

  Now the old grandmother wanted to thank him again and embarrass him with hugs and kisses. He scowled at the bathysphere, then rolled his aching neck. Best to get it over with. Best to leave quickly and go back to his own world, the world that seemed blank now by comparison.

  One last time, he bowed to Ane Zaki and ruffled Benito’s hair. Then, before emotion could overtake him, he rushed through the van’s airlock, dove into the sea and swam to the bathysphere. Juanita was waiting alone inside. She’d dyed her sack dress an earthy red and tied her long gray hair with a strip of the same rough cloth. Her new plastic boots shouted green. Otherwise, she wore no adornments, but she studied him with a self-assurance he hadn’t noticed before.

  “Let’s take a trip,” she said, closing the hatch.

  Dominic glanced at his wrist node. “I don’t have much time. I’m expected elsewhere.”

  “Indulge me, banker.” Juanita shifted the old-fashioned levers, and the bathysphere sank into the ocean.

  She handled the controls with skill. Even though she was the same gray-haired grandmother, she looked like a different person. Dominic tried to analyze what changed her. Posture maybe, or the way she held her head. The way her eyes twinkled.

  “Watch the view,” she said, pointing to the small round screen.

  They descended steadi
ly, and in a few moments, the miner’s town loomed up out of the murk. Divers had strung necklaces of underwater floodlights, and the lamps cast cloudy glows through the green ocean. Dominic bent closer to study the blurred images forming on the screen. There was the Pressure of Light, now rooted to the seafloor by jerry-built annexes, enclosed walkways and tethered diving bells. Juanita brought the shuttle about, and he saw the old crawler from a different angle, its belt-driven treads mired deep in the silt. Not far away, the Dominic Jedes rocked very slightly on its moorings. Shipshape and fully occupied, its windows glowed a warm inviting yellow. Next to it lay the Zygote, listing a few degrees starboard. Blue-white flashes from a dozen welding rigs showered down its rusty flank, and shiny new patch-welds covered a third of its hull. Juanita steered toward the garbage mountains, where more wrecks lurked in the gloom, waiting for repair.

  “Take me closer,” he said suddenly. The mountains were moving. Every hillock and bluff of accumulated junk swarmed with activity. What was going on?

  Juanita took the shuttle low. Frustrated with the screen’s poor resolution, Dominic rushed to the tiny portal, cupped his hands around his eyes and peered through the thick, distorting glass. The mountains were covered with divers. They were picking through the waste, salvaging scrap, and he saw them piloting motorized sleds of reclaimed metal and plastic along the littered valley floors. The sleds held other things, too. Bales of cable. Machine parts. Electronic components. Dominic could only imagine the riches they were finding. These mountains held enough material to build Trondheim ten times over.

  “Your money made this possible,” Juanita said

  He pressed his face closer to the glass. “How many people are here now?”

  “That’s confidential. I just thought you’d like to see your investment paying off.” Juanita rested a hand lightly on his shoulder. “There’s something else you should see. Come back to the screen.”

  She punched keys, and the screen dissolved into whirling rainbow colors. Some kind of graphic took shape, with surprising definition considering the shuttle’s obsolete screen. Dominic tried to make sense of the colored patterns. Weather map? Satellite view of the upper atmosphere? Whatever it represented, it was beautiful. Bright green-and-blue masses streamed in whorls, condensed into white lumps, then exploded and re-formed. Perhaps it was an artist’s rendition Of the early universe.