He had learned nothing new from the memory, but it remained in his head after the initial flashback, allowing him to examine it in more detail. At first, little extra came. He had felt sad, watching the playback three years in the past, and angry, but his present self couldn't explain the latter emotion. He couldn't recall where the data had come from, although he imagined it wouldn't have been hard to obtain with his contacts then. He didn't know why he had been watching it, either, except to torture himself with feelings of guilt and inadequacy. And he didn't know when the original experience had taken place—on which day between April 11 and 19, 2066.
He had learned very little from the two flashbacks so far—but it was undeniably progress.
“How much output is there from the dying brain?” he asked QUALIA. “Can we squeeze it all into an hour?”
“I am fast-tracking the input, Jonah. That may be why memories are emerging spontaneously rather than—”
Click
“—hiding out here and waiting for it to come. Don't you see? Your isolation makes you ineffective, and your insulation makes you vulnerable. If he wants to find you, he will, just like I did. It wasn't hard.”
“But you had access to Lindsay's data,” said Karoly Mancheff. “That made it easier.”
“Only marginally.” Jonah's voice was raised and strained. “The point is, it can be done. Maybe later than sooner, but done all the same. And when the time comes, you'll—”
Click
“—respond, please. Jonah—”
“I'm here. Just.”
“I said, if you try verbalising the details you wish to recall, that may encourage event-specific recall instead of—”
“I heard you the first time. You're distracting me.”
The conversation he had just remembered came from the 17th—he knew that much. Stress had coloured the memory like viewing it through a filter. He still didn't know who or what he was talking about, but he could recall now from where he had obtained the location of the WHOLE head office. The information had been stored on Lindsay's work-station—which meant that the work-station itself must have been working at that point. The core programming must have been erased at a later date.
By whom?
Verbalising the question produced no response. Either the memory was missing, or he had never known the answer to the question, or the technique itself was invalid.
What about Marylin?
The response was almost instantaneous.
Click
A hand-stitched rosette caught his eye as he stood by the tapestry that hid the interior of the yist chapel from view. He focussed on it to the exclusion of everything around him. But the muffled voice droned on—“Science teaches us that there are no such things as souls”—quoting from that damned book Lindsay and his mates in WHOLE had loved so much. He couldn't ignore it. For a supposedly secular funeral, there was an awful lot of mysticism flying about.
He really should have turned up on time, he chided himself. And now that he was late, he really should go in anyway. But he couldn't. It felt wrong. It was Lindsay's lie, not his. People would find out soon enough, and when they did, they would understand. Or not. He didn't care much either way.
He was honest enough to admit that the real reason he wasn't there was because Marylin might be.
Click
He blinked. So, the technique worked, and it was much smoother than relying on chance. But it hadn't told him much in this case. He wasn't really surprised. Marylin had walked out on him before the 11th, so it was unlikely that any of the partitioned memories would contain—
Click
“—any mention of me or my presence here. By the time you're found, InSight will have made sure of that. And if, by some incredible fluke, you do remember something, who would take the word of a v-med junkie? Much less risky than assassination or blackmail, no?”
“Mary—” he gasped, his face forced down into the pillow as the muzzle of a gas delivery device jammed into his neck.
“Ah, yes. Your partner. I wouldn't worry about her. She won't find you until I'm good and ready.”
The sharp sting of the gas-gun made him jump. “No!”
“Yes, Jonah. Goodbye for now.”
The pressure holding him down eased as his muscles relaxed. Whatever drug he had been given, his overseer couldn't fight it. But he remained conscious, horribly so, as the gas-gun came up and fired again, this time delivering a stream of nanoware into his bloodstream. He could neither move nor make a sound.
All he could—
Click
—feel was a terrible combination of relief and dismay. He had been given InSight deliberately to suppress his memories. Now he knew he had not been suicidal. But who had given it to him? He couldn't tell from that memory.
Who?
“Jonah, I am becoming concerned about your mental well-being.”
“Be quiet! Leave me alone!”
“I am genuinely sorry to disturb you, but—”
Click
“—I am aware that you have been less than honest in your dealings with us, especially with respect to certain data obtained without formal permission. We don't mind that you have it, of course, but we would rather you went through the normal channels.”
Jonah stared at the man standing in the unit's living room. Two weeks ago the face had been that of a stranger; now he knew it well. It belonged to Herold Verstegen.
“Why the hell are you here?”
“There's no need to be so suspicious, Jonah.” Verstegen took several slow steps across the room, touching objects as he went: the back of a chair, a plant, a sculpture. His eyes never left Jonah for long. “I came because I am concerned for you. We all are. Your father's death has come as a great shock to no one more so than you, and on top of the recent dissolution of your investigative partnership—”
“That's none of your business.”
“On the contrary, Jonah: it is my business. I am a human being who cannot pass by when a close relative of a former colleague is in need. You must be under an awful amount of strain.”
“That still doesn't explain why you're here.”
“Can I put it any more bluntly?” Verstegen bent down and picked something off the coffee table. At first Jonah couldn't tell what it was. “I'm worried about you killing yourself, of course.”
“What makes you think that?”
“Why, this.”
As Verstegen's hand came up and out, Jonah realised that he was holding a pistol. Jonah's pistol. He had left it lying in full view.
“Very careless, Jonah. Can you blame me for being concerned?”
The eye of the barrel pointed directly at him just for a second, underscoring with menace any genuine sincerity Verstegen's words might have held, before Jonah reached out and took the weapon from him.
“Fuck you, Verstegen.”
“You have been stealing from us, Jonah,” he said. “Perhaps, in future, we can cooperate. I'm sure that will make our conversations—”
Click
“—less stressful.”
Jonah blinked.
The globe was gone. In its place was a simulation of a candle. The flickering of its narrow flame had caught his attention.
“QUALIA! What do you think you're doing?”
“Your prevocal outputs are becoming increasingly erratic. I am attempting to alter the procedure in order to make the assimilation of memory less stressful. Please tell me if anything I do—” Click “—makes a difference.”
Click
His head was under water—
Click
“Wait—”
Click
—and the pain was in his chest, but the—
Click
“—QUALIA, stop! Whatever you're—”
Click
—real hurt was in his head, where he could feel his thoughts—
Click
“—doing, you're making it—”
Click
—slowly an
d inevitably fading to—
Click
“—worse!”
Click
Click
Click
—black.
Click
Everything was calm. He was wrapped in darkness, in silence, in peace. He thought nothing, experienced nothing, was nothing. Time passed, but he did not mark its passing. Time passed, but he didn't care. And as time continued to pass, he learned to forget. That, after all, was the point.
Click
He burst out of the void and into a sensory explosion.
“QUALIA!”
“Be calm, Jonah! I am here!”
“Where's here?” The candle was a pillar of fire an impossible distance away. “What the hell did you do to me? How long was I gone?”
“I intended no harm, Jonah. I swear. Your brain—”
“How long?”
“Twenty-four minutes and forty-eight seconds.”
“Jesus christ—”
“The loss of time is irrelevant. The inputs continued unchecked. Listen to me, Jonah. The interruption was only to your centres of consciousness, and may have worked in your favour. You have been spared the trauma of recall driven by subconscious urges or spurious connections. Can you tell me what happened?”
“I was back under InSight,” he said. “I was asleep. No—I was dead. I was nothing. I was—”
Click
“—beginning to think that you had killed Lindsay.”
“Me?” Herold Verstegen laughed in his face. “Next you'll be telling me I was—”
Click
“—I was—” He shook his head to clear the fragment of memory. “I'm confused.”
“The dormant portions of your own brain were activated by the stimulus. For a short period of time, the InSight agents still present in your tissue were also active. You fell into the hibernation state your cortex has been conditioned to adopt by years of repeated entrainment.”
“So I really was back there?”
“In a physiological sense, yes.”
“Who's to say it won't happen again?”
“It won't. I will avoid, in future, the combination of inputs that encouraged the state. In attempting to regulate the recollections, I in fact made things worse.”
“But it's all right now?”
“In a manner of speaking, yes.”
“In what manner of speaking.”
“We have only five minutes left before I must end the simulation.”
“So? How much more do we need to do? Once you've finished inputting the memories, it doesn't matter whether I access them here or in the real world. Are we nearly there?”
“The superimposition is complete. This, combined with your reversion to hibernation, alerted me to the difficulty we are now experiencing. It was my intention to return you to the Resurrection suite immediately—in case the simulation itself was contributing to your condition, not just my interference. Returning you then would also have saved processing time otherwise wasted maintaining the simulation.”
“But obviously that didn't happen,” he said, trying to guess ahead.
“No. Normal Resurrection procedures have been interrupted. We are unable to synthesise your physical body. Something—or someone—is preventing us from bringing you back.”
“You mean I'm trapped here?”
“To put it simply,” said the AI, “yes.”
“But—” His eyes widened as the realisation sunk in: Five minutes.
He was trapped only so long as the hot-wire simulation lasted.
After that, he would entirely cease to be.
Click
It was three o'clock in the morning, West Australian Standard Time. He had woken suddenly from a dream about Lindsay—a dream in which he saw again the moments leading up to the explosion. He couldn't understand why they were bothering him so much. Bad enough that it had happened; worse that he should torture himself with the memories, over and over again.
Even now, awake, he couldn't get the images out of his mind: Lindsay in the lab, doing his best to avoid the argument, claiming he was busy, glancing at his watch, turning away to fiddle with the equipment, looking over his shoulder, shifting slightly then—
It hit him. The truth unfolded in his mind like a flower awaiting the sun. He knew who had killed Lindsay, and why. He knew why SciCon was so concerned that he was interested, and why the inquest was doomed to explain nothing. He even knew why Lindsay had taken the d-mat to SCAR the day before he died.
But in the darkness and solitude of his bedroom, he didn't smile. Instead he felt very sad. And that was all.
Click
For the first time in QUALIA's existence, SHE was overwhelmed by inputs.
On one channel was Jonah McEwen, reacting with surprisingly subdued anger to the news that he had been trapped in a hot-wire simulation. On another was Fabian Schumacher, more concerned about the ramifications of the simulation itself than McEwen's life, although the latter was, of course, a consideration. Odi Whitesmith occupied a third, linked by VTC to many of the involved MIU staff-members. A fourth contained Jago Trevaskis, his face becoming increasingly red as each minute over the deadline saw the MIU fall deeper into debt. And Marylin Blaylock was on yet another, wanting to know what had gone wrong.
SHE was also aware of Herold Verstegen on an anonymous line, simply observing for the moment. He was silent, watching the crisis break around his creation with keen interest.
That, somehow, only made it worse. SHE felt tested for the first time in well over a year. And if immediacy of response was a criterion, then SHE had already failed. There was a limit to how far QUALIA's awareness could be spread, even with twenty Standard Human Equivalent data processors linked in a synergistic array. Simple mathematical or analytical tasks could be delegated to eikons like KittyHawk, but where higher thought was required only a substantial proportion of QUALIA's processing power would suffice. Instead of dividing QUALIA's consciousness into progressively smaller pieces, SHE was forced to rank the inputs and deal with them as SHE could.
“I am sorry to keep you waiting, Director Schumacher,” SHE said.
“Don't apologise, Q,” he said, nodding at the nearest camera. “Only a few events could come close to bringing KTI to a standstill: this would have to be one of them. What is the situation at the moment?”
SHE outlined the latest development as concisely as possible, downloading raw data and edited text files into his overseer for later perusal. He absorbed it rapidly.
“If only we'd avoided the whole thing,” he mused. “It would've been so much simpler. Could this be a glitch?”
“No, sir. All other hot-wire simulations have been performed without incident—as has this one, in essence. The fault lies in the Resurrection procedures. They will not allow his Last Sustainable Model to be accessed. Without that data, which is continuously updated by the simulation, we cannot recreate his physical body.”
“You oversee much of the Resurrection procedure. Have you found any sign of sabotage?”
“No, sir.”
“Yet it must be sabotage, related somehow to the investigation. We can have no doubt about that. The question is: who's behind it?”
“The Watchers have—”
“Don't even mention them, QUALIA. Until we know how someone managed to delete Herold's records from the security files, I have to assume the entire system is compromised. We will continue to talk, of course, but discretion is advisable.” Schumacher rubbed his chin. “Especially where they are concerned. I've already heard from RAFT, you know. How they found out is anyone's guess. They want to know what the hell we're going to do about it now that the situation exists.”
“Have you decided yet, sir?”
“No. The MIU and Jonah are contractually bound to accept any consequences of their actions, so we're not obliged to help. But not to help would be a serious public relations blunder. And no matter what, we'll set a precedent. We can't possibly hide it. It's the MIU we're dea
ling with, not KTI, and it's accountable to the EJC. They'll be next, wanting to know if the rumours are true.”
“I believe Director Trevaskis has already been contacted by Chief Commissioner Disario, requesting a full report.”
He rolled his eyes. “Well, she'll have to be stalled. Make sure Jago's aware of that.”
“I have him on hold, sir, and will be sure to tell him when I can.”
“You really are stretched, aren't you?” Schumacher chuckled to himself. “Don't worry, Q. I'll talk to him myself. About time we stopped relying on you quite so much, eh?”
He disconnected the line, and QUALIA moved onto the next priority.
“I see what's going on, now,” said Jonah. “Everything I say and do in here is being monitored. I have no Privacy at all. That in itself doesn't bother me, except for the fact that one of the people watching me is the Twinmaker. If he's high enough in the KTI decision-making chain, it won't be hard for him to put me out of the picture, if it turns out the superimposition has worked. Do you see what I mean? The moment I start spilling my guts about what I've remembered, I'll be shut down. And the only way to avoid that is to produce hard evidence and have the Twinmaker removed—but I can't do anything like that from in here. I can't even talk to anyone. I've been effectively neutralised.”
“That's an interesting theory,” SHE said, as diplomatically as SHE could, “but it suggests that the Twinmaker has intended this to happen all along. I find it hard to credit that anyone could have anticipated the sequence of events that led to this, let alone planned it in detail. The expedition to Quebec could have ended quite differently, for instance, as could have your murder on Mars.”
“So he's winging it. I don't know. Why couldn't he be? All he had to do was give the nod for the simulation when the opportunity arose, or support the motion along the way. He didn't have to know exactly what would happen, just what could happen.” Jonah chuckled bitterly. “And don't tell me who was in favour of the simulation. I shouldn't even speculate aloud about this. How long are we over-time now?”
The Resurrected Man Page 38
