Places in the Darkness

by Chris Brookmyre

  “If I may draw upon a comparison that should make sense to most of you here today, people complain about the Quadriga having a Byzantine command structure where it’s seldom apparent who is in charge of what.”

  There is another ripple of laughter, this time polite rather than genuine, though to Alice this line sounded more like Gonçalves’s own thoughts.

  “Believe me, it’s a paradigm of unified purpose compared to the brain. Multiple competing systems are permanently striving for attention, each of them with its own command centre urgently processing information to offer up in support of its case. It’s been described as a maelstrom, a raging chaos of simultaneous processes and events. As one such command centre temporarily attains primacy over all the rest, the brain retrospectively rationalises the outcome and constructs a narrative to give the impression that a solitary unified entity was at the helm the whole time. In short, consciousness is a lie your brain tells you to make you think you know what you’re doing.”

  None of this is new to Alice. It’s kind of a dumbed-down stump speech tailored to the corporate audience. She finds it disappointing to witness some people’s surprise, evidently never having heard this stuff before. Nonetheless their response smacks of curious amusement rather than being intellectually engaged, as though the speaker is sharing mere colourful factoids for their entertainment.

  What is truly incredible is that so many people here have willingly adopted Neurosophy’s technology without grasping the first principles of what lies behind it, but she guesses it’s the same as how so few automobile drivers throughout history could have told you about the workings of the internal combustion engine.

  Gonçalves is already blowing a few minds but she is merely warming up. As anyone who knows the first thing about her would anticipate, she’s not here to talk about the brain in general, but about memory.

  Alice wishes the professor could give her some pointers regarding what is wrong with her own right now. Maybe it’s to do with getting used to space, in combination with an extreme form of jet lag, but just like on the elevator, when she woke up a few hours ago in her room, it was as though her short-term memory needed a reboot. She could recall all the details about her trip, and even the meal she had upon arrival, but she had no recollection of getting undressed and going to bed. This bothers her as she likes to know how long she has slept, to ensure it is within recommended parameters.

  “Memory is not a unified process of thought either,” Gonçalves explains, calling up a holographic model of the brain. “There is no single location where the brain stores your memories. Instead, it works a little like the random-access model of computer memory, with the information broken down and distributed to different areas. Where it differs from the computer model, of course, is that word ‘random.’ The brain’s sorting system is more specific. Visual information, for instance, is archived in the occipital lobe, while emotions go to the amygdala.”

  Alice is three rows from the front, from where she can see the backs of around thirty heads. The scars are only visible on the close-cropped, but it’s a safe assumption most of them have had the mesh procedure. It is not compulsory for employment aboard CdC—that would be illegal—but if there are two candidates for a post and only one has had a mesh implanted, there’s no contest as to who would get the job. However, it has to be stressed that people don’t regard undergoing the procedure as a price for getting a job up here; rather, they see the opportunity to get it as one of the benefits. These days, just about everybody has a lens rig, but that’s merely a wearable accessory, a data and comms device for rendering second-hand information like its i-ancestors. You can pop out the contacts (though these days you seldom need to for comfort), disconnect from the wrist disc and tap out the sub-vocal. Whether the format be text, pictures, audio or video, it’s still a matter of passive consumption of the information on the part of the user, and what you retain is up to you.

  The mesh, however, allows the uploading of information—effectively new memories—directly to the human brain. You don’t need to read or experience new information, you simply know it, and you can’t forget what you learned or choose to switch it off at the end of the day. It’s a whole other level of tech, and if you want that, you need to go to Neurosophy on CdC, because that’s the only place where the implant surgery is legally approved. Technically, those volunteering to undergo it are signing up to be part of a long-term medical trial. The trial itself was only given the go-ahead on the understanding that approval to offer the procedure on Earth would not even be applied for until a sufficient proportion of its first generation of subjects had died of old age without demonstrating side effects or exhibiting behaviour that might offer grounds for concern. And as each refinement or upgrade to the technology effectively resets the clock on that stipulation, the procedure looks like remaining an option exclusive to CdC for a long time yet.

  “If you take a single experience, such as a day at the beach, vast quantities of information are processed and filed away in multiple locations.”

  As she speaks, different areas of the holographic brain light up, the words Sight, Motion, Smell, Language and others orbiting the organ briefly before pinging off to their respective destinations.

  “What makes this such a remarkably efficient storage system is that reliving just one element, the smell of sun lotion for example, can cause the brain to rapidly retrieve all those other constituents to form what feels to us like a unified and vivid memory.

  “Where it gets complicated is that all memories are highly subjective and individualised. Two people can have roughly the same experience, but the differing ways their brains categorise that information has consequences for how it is reassembled. That day at the beach, one person merely saw ‘boats.’ The other person is a yacht chandler and thus sub-categorised the information in a way the first couldn’t: she saw skiffs, catamarans, ribs, rigid hull dinghies. And this, ladies and gentlemen, is what prevents me from creating my robot army. For those of us in the business of artificially inserting information, it puts intractable limits on what we can achieve.”

  Gonçalves smiles at the response. She still seems timid in the face of an auditorium full of people, but despite her shyness there is no mistaking the pleasure she takes in seeing that she is connecting.

  It amuses Alice—and, she wonders, does it amuse the professor?—to see people touch the site of the procedure on the backs of their heads each time she mentions robots, or in any way alludes to the risks they don’t like to think about. It’s like involuntarily scratching when someone starts talking about fleas and head lice.

  Developed in collaboration with her late colleague Dr. Sandy Shelley, Gonçalves’s revolutionary innovation involves the insertion of an optogenetic mesh between the brain and the meninges, carried out via surgical nanobots through a small incision near the base of the skull. The technology was first proven viable more than three decades ago, but came to a halt after a fire ripped through the Neurosophy Foundation’s original site on Wheel One. It was a sobering demonstration of the limitations of the supposedly foolproof safety systems that were designed to respond to the most feared danger of life in space. The automated response mechanisms contained the blaze and prevented it from spreading beyond the lab where it started, but not without trapping Dr. Shelley inside, with fatal results.

  Though Professor Gonçalves was mercifully spared when the tragedy struck, it nonetheless came close to destroying her too. She was devastated by the loss of her closest friend, the person she described as “the real genius in our partnership,” and for a long time was unable to face the onerous task of rebuilding their work from the ashes, alone. Eventually, however, she drew upon the same strength that had seen her survive refugee camps in her childhood, and endeavoured to succeed in lasting tribute to Dr. Shelley’s memory.

  “As you are all aware, many of you first-hand, we can now rapidly insert large quantities of new information into the human brain. However, it is this individualised
natural storage system that makes it impossible for us to create false memories, or to implant someone else’s memories in your head without you being aware of it. For instance, we can upload highly detailed information about a town so that you know your way around when you get there, but we can’t give you the memory of having been there before.”

  That was what concerned everybody when the reconstructed technology was first unveiled: the fear of remembering something that never happened. At a legal level, people were worried about concepts such as falsely providing an alibi for someone or being implicated by their own memory in events they had nothing to do with. More viscerally they were simply squeamish about the possibility of remembering something that never happened—or that happened to somebody else. This had proven to be an unfounded concern, due to the “watermark effect” that people experienced when a non-native memory was accessed by their mesh: a conflict between this new data and what the rest of their brain—and body—was telling them.

  Alice understands the principles and does not harbour any irrational fears regarding the implications. Nonetheless, even now that the option is open to her, she has no intention of having the procedure. She wouldn’t let anyone mess with her brain, not even if the mesh was implanted by Professor Gonçalves herself.

  In her case this is less a matter of squeamishness than snobbishness.

  Since childhood Alice has enjoyed what have been described as prodigious powers of retention, though she would contend that discipline and endeavour have played a major part in this: the more she studies, the more she knows. Some might say her distaste for memory enhancement is like a naturally attractive person being scornful of someone undergoing cosmetic surgery. However, the phrase “easy come, easy go” seems apposite. Alice is a believer in hard work being its own reward, and that you place a greater value on what you know when it has taken genuine effort to learn it.

  “Perhaps the best illustration is in the truth behind the mythologised notion—which I believe is widely held on Earth—that a mesh allows you to learn a new language overnight. This is no more true than the notion that you can similarly learn to play the piano overnight or instantly master a technical skill. In these cases, we encounter the issue of muscle memory. When we learn to play an instrument, through repetition and practice, the signals controlling our fingers no longer originate entirely in the hippocampus, but also in the motor cortex, the cerebellum and the basal ganglia.”

  Everyone is familiar with the disconnect. Many who had tried it said it was actually more frustrating trying to learn the piano after an upload than it was naturally, because your mind knew what it wanted to do but your fingers wouldn’t cooperate. Thus the mesh works principally as an instant-access reference system for retrieving information, something that is highly desirable in an environment such as CdC, requiring such a volume and variety of technical knowledge.

  “In the case of uploading a new language, you cannot speak it because your mouth and your tongue may not know where to begin. What we are uploading therefore is essentially a rapidly accessible translation dictionary, whereby you know what the words mean and can instantly deconstruct much of the syntax and grammar, but crucially what you infer and understand will be different from person to person. This is why, even if you upload the entire dictionary of your native language, the way your vocabulary developed individually means it won’t necessarily occur to you to use these new words in everyday conversation.

  “So to reassure you one last time regarding why I cannot create my robot army, the crucial thing about how our technology interacts with the human brain is that the information we insert cannot alter who you are. Rather, it is who you are, your very individuality, that uniquely alters the information.”

  IMPORT DUTY

  Nikki instantly detects a rise in tension as they make their way out on to the floor of Dock Eleven. It’s more than just the usual silent anxiety that attends an important pick-up. Her instincts tend to serve her well when it comes to these situations, and something feels off.

  It’s not coming from her people, though maybe she’s picking up that they’re feeling it. She’s here with Felicia, who always carries the permits and paperwork (albeit there’s no actual paper), as well as Tug and Kobra, two of Yoram’s most dependable lieutenants. They’ve all done this twenty times at least: same routine, same schedule, same bay.

  There’s a shuttle coming up through the floor right now, rising diagonally from an escalator shaft, a haze around the wingtips where the moisture in the air meets the freezing cold of the metal. The one they’re here to pick up from should have been fully unloaded by this point and being prepared for its run back to Heinlein.

  The shuttles land on the outside of the wheel, after equalising their velocity and locking on to the auto-approach system. Once stationary, the craft are anchored to a platform which flips upside down then passes through the wheel to the surface. Nikki hates shuttle travel and has done it as few times as possible. She remembers the weird lurching sensation in her gut; not from the platform turning, which oddly exerts no sensation whatsoever, but from the moment when the spin of the wheel starts exerting its pseudo-gravitational force. It is merely one of a long list of things she detests about space flight.

  Each of these cargo docks is like a horseshoe, overlooked by two levels of platforms along each of which are multiple delivery points. There’s constant traffic in and out of these places, maintaining the flow of supplies and materials like CdC’s vascular system.

  Ground level is where the paperwork is cleared and the payloads distributed. A system of conveyor belts and elevators takes the crates and pallets from the shuttle to their allocated delivery bays, with the larger and heavier items sent higher up where the gravity is lighter, making handling and transfer easier. The bulkiest payloads flying into CdC tend to be hoppers of raw materials for the fabrication processors, but there are dedicated shuttle docks for handling that stuff. Dock Eleven is one of the many dispatch and distribution hubs handling a constant variety of freight, which is why Yoram chose it.

  There is the usual hum and whir of machinery, but unfamiliar shouts are ringing around the dock. That’s what’s setting her off, Nikki realises. There are new personnel among the ground crew. Something has changed, and everybody senses that they might need to be a little sharper.

  She doesn’t recognise the manifest administrator who strides across to check Felicia’s credentials and verify her order. There are other new faces hefting boxes on to the conveyor. She scans the admin’s code-badge with her lens. Officials don’t wear nametags: if your lens doesn’t let you download their details, then you’re not cleared to know their identity.

  His name is Brock Lind. He seems officious but polite. Nikki doesn’t need to read anything into the fact that he’s new, but she can’t ignore how that instinctive sense of unease is gnawing at her.

  Felicia transfers her details, verifying who she is and what she is here to collect.

  Lind has that frozen look people get when they’re scrolling too much data on their lenses, or waiting for something to update.

  “There should be five pallets,” she states, verbal confirmation remaining an important failsafe against misunderstanding or misfiled details.

  Lind frowns.

  “There doesn’t appear to be anything listed. The last shuttle has been processed and all payloads allocated.”

  Nikki fixes him with her gaze, letting him know he’s under scrutiny.

  “That can’t be right,” Felicia insists. “Despatch from Exo-Chem Industries for Agritek Laboratories, CdC Wheel One. Arriving on Shuttle Hermia, zero-five hundred hours.”

  Lind gives his head a subtle shake, his tone polite but certain.

  “The last shuttle to offload was Khlestakov. I don’t have a listing for your delivery on the manifest and I don’t have Hermia scheduled to land here either.”

  “This is bullshit,” Felicia insists.

  “Calm down,” Nikki warns her. She is suddenly a
ware that in her rising panic, Felicia might say something indiscreet, like asking the guy if this is a shakedown. It might well be, but if so he will make that known in time. Right now there is no reason to let him know there is anything illegal going on.

  “I’m sure there’s just a snafu someplace,” Nikki continues, “and Mr. Lind will be able to help us get to the bottom of it.”

  “I’m all over it,” he agrees.

  Nikki watches him gesture with his fingers, working an invisible display on his lens while speaking to someone over his sub-vocal.

  “Yes, Angela, I’m sending the details through now. Exo-Chem, for Agritek. Shuttle Hermia. Ah. I see. Well, that would explain it.”

  “What?” Felicia asks impatiently.

  He gives them an apologetic sigh, biting his bottom lip.

  “I’m afraid it turns out there’s been an incident on W2. An unscheduled all-stop. Nothing’s been able to land there since it happened, so all shuttles are being diverted here to W1. They’re pulling in the Meridian staff for overtime. It’s about to get real busy in here.”

  Nikki looks up the local feeds on her lens. He’s not lying. W2 has stopped rotating and is in a state of lockdown until they can get the problem fixed, after which everybody is going to be busy mopping when the gravity comes back on.

  “So where the hell is our stuff?” Felicia demands.

  Lind pauses, searching again.

  “On auto-approach now. Dock Two.”

  “Dock Two? That’s all the way over on fucking Sharman.”

  “Sorry. They’ve altered the landing priorities. Updated all our schedules.”

  “With the stuff bound for Wheel Two jumping the queues, no doubt,” Kobra grumbles wearily.

  “Looks like,” Lind agrees with a shrug. “Tough break. What you gonna do?”

  It’s a rhetorical question, but Lind looks to Felicia and to Nikki as though they might answer.