Tinman

by Simon Fairhead

  “Industrial espionage. I understand. A mining robot on Ibo can listen in on the copper ore executives and calculate their expected revenue for the quarter; the service droid in the Imo nightclub can overhear the deals done at the bar. Very clever.”

  “No… all right, they do these things, and some of these things are useful to me in business, but you haven’t understood the network, Parrish. I have two hundred and forty five thousand Halliday Unisphere and Duosphere brains in circulation in the Mio system, in every sector of public life. They see everything, know everything. All this data is collected in Hiroto, the avatar core.”

  “A living brain? The information would create a psychosis. Multiple feeds would lead to schizophrenia, and God knows what else.”

  “Hiroto is not a normal brain, Parrish. It was seeded from a brain tumour cell before you were born. It is an immortal cell, dividing itself forever long beyond the death of its host body. I have introduced stem cells to encourage diversity and it has grown itself multiple cortexes and hippcampi. It is an organic super computer, Mr Parrish, specifically designed to answer questions beyond the capabilities of human intelligence.”

  Art stared up at the waiting, benign face of Hiroto, so close he could see the pixels on the screen. “Let me see it.”

  “Ms Kjanvik, put the Hiroto tank on screen.”

  “No, Halliday, let me really see it. Where is it?”

  Halliday was agitated. “What is the Dawkins’ feed, Parrish, I need his information.”

  Art drew a deep breath, and then slowly released it. Now he was in control.

  “I would like to see the Hiroto brain, Mr Halliday, if I may.”

  “We’re wasting time. It’s a brain, in a nutrient tank; you’ve seen thousands of them.”

  “Where does your lift go?”

  Halliday tugged his fur coat close around his wasted body, as if a chill wind had blown through the overheated office. He shook his head, but it was a gesture to himself. “Follow me.”

  The two men passed Kurasawa and went into the cylindrical lift. Art caught a glance of Ms Kjanvik at her desk through a glass partition; a pale woman with white-blonde hair, wearing a floral blouse. On her head was a com-cap, normally only worn by generals in battle, a multi-feed communications device, thought and voice operated. Kjanvik sat in a reclined chair, her arms held loosely in her lap, her eyes staring blankly at the ceiling of the office as she administered the many and various communications of the Halliday empire. As the lift doors closed, he thought he saw a colostomy bag dangling on a plastic tube like a jellyfish by her side.

  There was a snack dispenser built in to one side of the lift. Art was about to put in a coin, when a bacon sandwich on a paper plate deposited itself in the out tray. As soon as he removed it, a paper plate of very expensive Imo sushi dropped into view for Halliday.

  “Tunnelling lervs? Aren’t they endangered?”

  Halliday snorted a laugh. “Extinct in seven months, like everything else. Did Ms Kjanvik get what you wanted?”

  “Sea pig. Yeah, that’s pretty damn close.”

  “It’s genuine sea-pig, none of that Proxy-Mam rubbish.”

  “Good.”

  They ate in awkward silence, until the lift pinged at its final destination.

  He had been expecting a quiet, subdued laboratory, perhaps a couple of scientists in attendance monitoring nutrient levels or going through standard health checks; he found instead what amounted to a global news office. A cacophony of overheard or engaged conversations cackled out of a great curved electronic wall. It showed perhaps a hundred audio/visual relays from Halliday’s brains dotted throughout the Mio system, all of it completely illegal. The relays changed every few seconds to show different feeds. Occasionally, one would white out and die, or flicker and fuzz as a connection lost its strength. In the centre of the screen, like a man bobbing in the suds of a bath tub, was the face of Hiroto. Sometimes he allowed himself to fade out, sometimes he would think the feeds into a pattern, group conversations or images that held some link with one another to highlight them for the hundred or so workers bustling about the large, open plan office that ringed the room. There was a great urgency here: Halliday had built Hiroto to answer questions beyond the ken of men, and now he was being called upon to fulfil his purpose. Three workers stood near the screen, two men and a tiny woman with shiny black hair. They barked questions at Hiroto, nodded at answers sent to their headsets.

  Halliday moved slowly towards the centre of the room. There was a curved railing, Art saw. As they neared it, he noticed another level below them, also set around a curved rail. There were lab workers down there, computers, advanced laboratory equipment, colour coded plastic drums of chemicals. A rich saline smell wafted up to meet him. He leaned over the rail.

  There was Halliday’s great brain. Pink and grey, bulbous and convoluted, lapped by a body-temperature saline solution. Several thick brain-stems, like rhubarb stalks, snaked away from the untidy bulk of the cancerous brain and into bio-clamps that fed it blood and nutrients from the tanks above.

  He had expected something a little more diseased in appearance; the cancerous brain cells had been alive since the twentieth century, a hundred years before cancer was wiped out by gene therapy, but he found a healthy and robust organ.

  “Is he happy?”

  Halliday frowned and kept his gaze averted. This was the fundamental question; a question asked since the birth of cybernetics. Could an organic brain ever really be happy within a man-made carapace?

  “As you can see, Mr Parrish, he receives a multitude of stimuli.”

  “Intellectual stimuli, certainly. What about physical?”

  Bio-feedback had been driving cybernetics for the last seventy years. A robot that could properly sense its surroundings was a more efficient, more fulfilled robot. Depression and suicide had marred the early years of cybernetics. They were using human brains, after all, and despite only ever knowing a metal skin, despite all the sensory advantages that advanced auditory and visual hardware could bring, the basic human warmth of organic touch was missing. They could sense heat and cold and knew the pressure of their touch on an object, but the feedback was primitive and functional. They could not, for instance, judge if something was wet or dry, or feel the fine textures of an orange peel or a feather. Many simply pulled out their own power coupling, or shoved a finger into the socket of a charging station to short-circuit. In the short term, this was overcome with drugs. MDMA in their blood supply was common, but this inhibited proper brain function, and led, in some cases to dependence or addiction; then came gene therapy. Brains were bred for a greater natural capacity for happiness or contentedness. Brains with superior serotonin uptake were cloned, their tissues implanted in developing brains.

  However, all the cybernetic organisms ever wanted, it was discovered after decades of clinical and field trials, was love. And sex. The old joke was ‘You can take the brain out of the human, but you can’t take the human out of the brain.’

  So, software engineers set to work on what became known as the ‘porn channel’. The pornographic industry was gigantic. Only the extinction of humanity would signal its demise. In fact, in times of crisis, demand exploded. From black and white films, to video, DVD, and the internet in the twenty-first century, it had grown to fill every niche and format. Then came 3D TV, and ultimately, brainloads; images and sensations recorded directly from the minds of porn actors as they performed. They were filtered for content – originally to cut out any deeply disturbing thoughts the actors may have had during sex – but it was soon discovered that most of these were inane free-associations, personal issues, or banal day-to-day musings, from shopping lists to wondering when a cheque would clear.

  Brainloads saved the cybernetics industry. They fed the robots porn during their down-time.

  But human brains in man-made bodies are still human. They formed a union in 2260, and among their demands was self-generated stimuli. They had grown tired of being fed po
rnographic sensation and wished to make their own.

  Halliday had built for them, to avoid a revolution, or perhaps a war, Dick and Jane. Silicone skinned, physically perfect, crammed with the most advanced bio-feedback sensors, Dick and Jane looked very nearly human. He built five thousand of them and charged a premium for their sensory feeds. For a generous sum, any brain in his network could access their bio-feedback as they made love to any number of highly-paid porn actors or prostitutes, male and female. The ‘Steel Buddies’, as they became known, had the mental strength to put out of their minds that their sexual partner was controlled remotely from a disembodied brain within a metal skeleton. Actually, some didn’t care; some had experienced so many strange perversions in their careers that one more barely registered; and some (mostly women) liked the fact they were completely free of disease and had hygienic, wipe-clean surfaces. One actress, Rhonda Ring, who was past her pulchritudinous best and increasingly worked on the production side of the industry even made her fortune by developing and marketing a range of Dick and Jane cleaning products. Halliday’s lawyers jumped on her for copyright infringement, but Halliday himself reined them in. She was little people, making a few hundred thousand Imo dollars a year. Loose change. Hold back, act benign. Good PR.

  “He is content,” was all that Halliday said. “Now, if you can issue the security override codes to your robot, we’ll see what Dawkins knows.”

  Art turned to face this little withered man in his electronic throne and saw only his vulnerability. “No, Halliday, I will go and talk to him, alone.” He started to leave, then turned back and pointed at the giant screen. “And this has got to stop. It’s a direct violation of every privacy law I can think of. If the Union hears about it, they’ll tear this place apart.”

  “I can stop them, Mr Parrish.”

  “I know you can. Another violation of cyborg rights. They’re your children, Halliday; you love them and teach them everything you know and try and guide them down a useful and moral path, but in the end they are not your property. They are individuals. You know all this, Halliday. You used to believe it, too. What happened to you?”

  Halliday did not reply. Art stared at him for a moment, then gave a shallow, not-too-deferential bow, and strode back to the lift. It didn't matter any more. They had run out of time. He needed to get out into the open air, away from this subterranean cavern and its chemical stink.

  CHAPTER 8

  Dawkins hummed quietly between the desks in the lab watering the plants on the windowsills with a little yellow watering can decorated with a bright red flower pattern. 48 millilitres here, 110 millilitres there. He took the ph values of the soil as he made his rounds, and made calculations for feed alterations to encourage optimum growth. He stopped when Art stepped quietly into the lab.

  Art took off his coat and slumped into a high stool with a padded back-rest. The saki had caught up with him. He had fallen asleep for ten minutes in the back of the cab, and his body whimpered for more shut-eye. A good ten hours more.

  But he had to know what Dawkins knew.

  “Master needs a strong coffee, 350 millilitres, 88 degrees centigrade.”

  “Too right.”

  “Just like a plant.”

  Art smiled despite his weariness. Dawkins trundled off to make coffee.

  “Who is it? Who is there?”

  Art looked over his shoulder, looking for who had spoken. There was no one there. Then his mind slipped quaveringly into gear.

  “Ah, Six. Hello. How are you feeling?” He got up and went to the workbench where Six’s brain stood on its dedicated support station, surrounded by a mess of tools and components.

  “All physical systems except auditory channels offline. Is that S/0097134 Private Parrish A?”

  “It is, Six. You have nothing to worry about. We will re-assemble you shortly.”

  “May I have optical systems restored?”

  “Er, yes. Just a minute.” Art saw there was a remote camera on a gimbal amongst the detritus on the desk. He stood it on top of a monitor and plugged it into Six’s support station.

  “Accessing hardware. Found it. Thank you, Mr Parrish, I have control.” The little camera, some sort of video conferencing junk, whirred left and right, up and down, and finally took a 360 spin as Six manipulated the geared head. The lens angled up towards Art.

  He wondered if the explosion in the basement had wrecked any military hardware that may have been inhibiting Six’s rehabilitation.

  “Report vocabulary upgrade status.”

  “Corrupted programme repaired. Shall I run programme?”

  “Yes, Six. You may run it now.”

  For a second there was silence, then a babble of words, too fast for the ear to pick out, was emitted from Six’s rudimentary voice-box. This went on for three or four solid minutes, and then he was silent again. Dawkins returned with Art’s coffee.

  “Coffee, 350 millilitres, 88 degrees centigrade, four sugars, 2.3 grammes total.”

  “And what sort of bean have you used?”

  “Arabica-Mio variant, harvested – “

  “Sorry, Dawkins, I was being facetious. Tone down the science will you, you’ve been working too hard. Looks like Six is free of whatever software inhibitor the army plugged him with.”

  “I found a virus factory near the anterior cortex. I injected nano-sweepers to clear it out.”

  “Nice. Six, Shakespeare. Complete phrase. “To be or not to be…”

  There was a second of silence, and then the tinny speaker in Six’s cradle squawked.

  “To be, or not to be: that is the question:

  Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer

  The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

  Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,

  And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;

  No more; and by a sleep to say we end

  The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks

  That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation

  Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;

  To sleep: perchance to dream – .”

  Six would never be hailed as the new Olivier, but the intonation was correct, the meaning intact. “Good, Six. But what does it mean?”

  “For the character at that moment, it is an important question, literally one of “life and death”, but the general terms in which it is phrased gives it a resonance that reaches out past Hamlet. Hamlet poses the question on the most metaphysical level – not “shall I kill myself?”, nor “can I live like this?” but “to be or not to be”. It is existence itself that is up for debate in this speech.”

  “Attribute source of analysis.”

  “Jem Bloomfield, 2007. She has withered on the vine, like all of her generation.”

  “Well, yes, she has. She lived many centuries ago. But that was very poetic, Six. Dawkins, we’ve got to fix him up…”

  But he was wasting time. He shook his head, picked up the coffee and took a couple of gulps. He put it down again, and reached into an inside pocket for a cigarette. He pulled out Halliday’s stolen silver case of French cigarettes and lit one with his cheap lighter. He exhaled forcefully.

  “Lab One, disengage sprinklers,” he said.

  The fire sensors would have judged the tobacco smoke a threat to the laboratory, and Art didn’t want a cold shower. The thought of it made him gag. He was badly hung over, sleep deprived and scared.

  “Dawkins, Halliday knows about your phone message. How can we get to the Luhrmann Breach in five months?”

  Dawkins had continued watering the plants. He answered as he worked. “We must ride the shock-wave. It is the only force of sufficient velocity in the sector.”

  Art digested this information. “That’s way too much heat and pressure.”

  Dawkins gently doused the roots of a tiger orchid and nipped off a couple of unruly root-buds. “Data analysis disagrees.”

  He sucked hard on the cigarette, his heart beating like a t
iny fist against his sternum. “Spill the beans, then, Dawkins, come on!”

  The robot tipped a precisely measured amount of bone-meal into a plant pot and dug it carefully into the soil. “Halliday vessel 101-90 is the fastest ship in Imo orbit. Additional heat shielding from Kransky Orbital can be fitted in five weeks. Suitable parts are already available. Organic cradles for eight hundred people can be fitted in six weeks. Organic storage for eight hundred can be fitted at the same time.”

  Art rubbed his face up and down until his skin tingled with the friction of it, fighting the alcohol in his system. He needed to think clearly…

  Organic cradles. Organic storage. Brains and bodies. The mind and the flesh, divisible by science.

  Dawkins had registered his discomfort. “As you are aware, the operation is simple, Art.”

  Yes. As simple as getting a nut out of its shell. First, crack your nut…

  There was an inescapable logic to it. Art unexpectedly felt a surge of pride. Dawkins, a single robot with a brilliant mind, with access only to the Mio system’s legitimate information network had reached a viable escape plan, while Hiroto obviously continued to struggle with conflicting information from multiple feeds. Joy.

  As if sensing Art’s next question, Dawkins offered, “Passenger modification within this time-frame is mandatory.”

  Art nodded, and took another sip of coffee. Of course. Brain-piloted probes were common in the Mio System. They were cost-effective. It was far easier to plug a brain into a pressurised, heat and radiation shielded container than an entire body, with its irritating excretions and nutrient requirements. He and all of the other passengers in this lifeboat would have to be separated from their bodies if they wanted to survive.

  And Kate and Franco were coming with him. That was inescapable too. Fuck logic. They would be on board, no matter what. Make it part of the deal. Get a fucking signature out of the old bastard.

  “Time frame, Dawkins?” He knew the answer before it came. The shock-wave was barrelling towards them at near light-speed as they spoke, devouring everything in its path.