Cypulchre

by Joseph Travers MacKinnon

  “Why?”

  “You’ve got two problems in addition to the execution of whatever end-run the Anomaly has in mind.”

  Katajima sighs. “Well?”

  “The encryption poses a lot of problems. I locked myself out.”

  “Oh, for the love of God! Any idea of who could open it?”

  “No. Nobody.”

  Shouta leans back and rigs an imperious pose. “That is too bad. I was really hoping we could help each other.” He looks over at his men, still standing by the jukebox.

  “No, no. I’ll still be able to help,” Paul yells, erupting into a panicked excitement. “It’s just a matter of time and access.”

  “I do not know, Paul.”

  “Now I know you’re gaming me. This Anomaly is going to destroy the CLOUD, kill god-knows-how-many people, and cripple your business.” Paul pushes the stein out of his way and tents his fingers at the centre of the table. “We wouldn’t be talking if you didn’t need me. And here we are.”

  The taught-faced mogul opposite Paul grinds his teeth and tilts his head.

  “If you guarantee successful resets for my girls and the prevention of all future attempts on their part to synchronize, then I’m your man.”

  “You mentioned a second problem.”

  Paul leans back, and regains his composure. “Transport. You need a data-fragmentor to transport the Empty Thought.”

  “No problem. I can find one, or I will have my team build one.”

  Paul wants to ask Katajima whether he’d paid Q an anticipatory visit, but would have to explain what he was doing there. “Then we finish it, we transport it, and, assuming we’ve found some way to decrypt the activator, we let it do its thing.”

  “And the CLOUD? It’ll be left intact?”

  “I guarantee you: the Empty Thought will destroy the Anomaly before the Anomaly has a chance to destroy the CLOUD.”

  Shouta gives a subtle nod, then, clasping Paul’s hands, an emphatic one. “I am overjoyed to have the opportunity to work with you once again, old friend.”

  “Speaking of which, let’s get to it,” Paul says, upright and attentive. “What operating system are you running at the lab? It might take me a few minutes to adjust for future shock.”

  “Oh, no, Paul. You need your rest. Besides, there are matters I must attend to first, including disinhibiting you by clearing the charges the police are currently trying to nail you with. We have all of tomorrow to ready your Empty Thought, but will take more time if more time is required.”

  “Allen’s funeral?”

  “We’ll ferry to the funeral on Friday via Dragonfly.” He wiggles out of the booth, and stands up, throwing an intentional glance to Haruto. “Paul?”

  Paul looks up keenly.

  “My nephew will take you to your hotel room. In the morning, we will convene at your Barstow residence and get to work.”

  “Why my place?”

  “Quiet. Secluded. Safe, knowing you, and off the grid, yes?”

  “Yeah. I’ve a solar farm and a small aquifer. Some jammers and a magnetic band to throw my net address.”

  “Excellent.”

  “Why can’t we use the Outland labs?”

  “On the off-chance Winchester cannot see past your bad blood to his best interests, you and I will have to proceed as planned. We cannot afford any obstacles at this point in time, political or mortal. I will bring what you had finished of the Empty Thought over.”

  No need, I finished it already, Paul wants to say.

  “And secure a fragmentor while I am at it.”

  “Well, if we’re flying, it won’t be so inconvenient…”

  “My apologies. You will have to drive yourself out there. We will fly back together for the funeral.”

  A paranoid streak chills Paul from the inside out. Katajima’s being awfully inconsistent. “Drive? The other day you said it was too dangerous to drive.”

  “It would be doubly dangerous to make Winchester think we have gone behind his back. Suspicion turns friends into enemies, and enemies into corpses, after all.”

  “Alright. If I set out at sunrise, I can be ready to work by noon.”

  “Splendid.”

  “You’ll come alone?”

  “Yes. The fewer involved, the better our chances of surprising the Anomaly, whatever it is. Now, remember: the walls have eyes, the darkness ears…Best avoid the Anomaly until we have decided upon the equation that best suits us.”

  Paul, face afresh with hope, shakes Shouta’s hand. “Empty thoughts and full promises.”

  “Yes!” Shouta exclaims. “The former released, the latter kept!”

  Chapter 15: HIVE, SWEET HOME

  THE CLOSING DOOR CROPS Katajima’s nephew out of sight. Shuffling outside deals silence upon the elevator’s ping. Paul’s alone again, his chauffeur en route to the roof parking lot.

  He mag-bolts the door, and plots his head against it. Hangover’s come early. The cold steel repels him into the darkness.

  With a well-coordinated triangulation, he switches on the hotel’s density field, and populates it with data direct from his Barstow retreat via Monocle. It’s fuzzy and pixelated on account of Paul’s security software. Securitas, of course, requires more than one code to verify identity and intent, so Paul confirms with an incoherent string of alphanumeric.

  “Good evening, sir.”

  “Securitas, status?”

  “All systems normal.”

  “Great work. Unjam the feed. Let me see my boys.”

  Securitas decrypts the data, and directs it over to the Home interface that Fergus had mentioned. The data, filling the field, clarifies and conforms to Paul’s perception. Paul stumbles through the projected-blue fog, reflexively avoiding the hotel room’s hidden obstacles.

  He summons a live feed from his retreat’s 3D CCTV cameras. The frolicking forms of his dogs appear, first as digitally-corrupted, two-dimensional objects, and finally as hi-def, full-volume projections.

  “Zeus! Apollo!” Paul shouts.

  The dogs respond to their master’s voice—one crooks its head sideways—but are unsure as to its authenticity. They take turns shaking loose hair over the only carpet in Paul’s Barstow retreat.

  “Hey, y’little bastards.”

  Having dutifully tended to one another’s nether regions, they bound committedly towards Paul’s voice and reciprocated hologram. Their ears slacken from their initial points. Jaded, however, by the absence of their owner’s odour, the dogs slough back off-screen, ears pointed once again. The smile that’d slipped onto Paul’s face at the promise of affection flattens.

  He traipses through the hologram of his Barstow place, and opens a Net search screen within the Home interface. The flickering graphics on the floor-to-ceiling organic-LED projection highlights Paul and his decadent, old-fashioned furniture with a periwinkle varnish. He turns the screen’s opacity down two-thirds, letting the Blue Zone’s shimmering cityscape outside the hotel room burn through the lettered polymers.

  Across massive towers and over the Hyperloop’s red aura, Paul’s Net query lists likely answers, most of which he’s already familiar with.

  He swipes away the results, intuiting, instead: “IMPLANTS, CLOUD TECH.”

  The Net query refreshes, this time visualizing the resultant data-tree across the wall as well as against the city behind it. Trunks of code and branches of crypto-glyphs telling the story of the CLOUD’s construction stretch down the Blue Zone’s skyscrapers and take root below the Partition. The Home interface in the foreground makes sense of the Net results, pulling data and simplifying wiki-rhetoric into an organized spiral around Paul.

  Outside the hotel room window, an ad-barge penetrates the horizon, jetting slowly across the screen. It fires out a bigger-than-life hologram of a sperm whale bordered by tickertape, which reads, “AQUARIUM OF THE PACIFIC—BE THE FIRST TO SEE THE LAST OF THE GREAT SEA MAMMALS.”

  Paul tweaks the opacity of the screen to diffuse the ad-barg
e’s distracting lights. He filters his results over the faint outline of Los Angeles’ downtown, this time checking against what he already knows, as determined by the Home interface’s buffer. The data-tree shrinks to an artifact-ridden acorn, and begins to grow again.

  Impatient but certain that this most-recent search will prove to be the most interesting, Paul heads to the mini-bar for research supplies. He finds and wrestles off the cap of a bottle of rye. Snatching a glass from the cupboard, he pours a shot, downs it, and then fills the glass past the precedent he established, indicated by a thumb-deep watermark. With the brown tincture sloshing in hand, he clumsily trots over to the couch at the end of the bed, opposite the minimalist desk.

  “The Outland CLOUD,” he reads, the words blurring—worsened by the room’s apparent spin. “Developed by the Outland Corporation, was trial-released to the public…after the proven popularity of nano-tech HUD displays in the early 21st Century. Introjection capabilities of this variety were first tested at Berkeley and at the University of Toronto by the Katajima-Sheffield team, who eventually defined the parameters of the CLOUD.”

  A holovert emerges, bevelling the article. Despite Paul’s coding, one or two eventually get through every so often. Two scantily-clad and anatomically-complete androids writhe over some pathetic, clunk-head colonist. Apparently, under all his mech and tech, there’s still cause for sexual desire. It takes two or three tries, but Paul manages to intuit the pop-up off-screen.

  Already cognizant of most of the encyclopaedic history and rationale of the CLOUD, Paul reads on, hoping the solution to his domestic strife is simpler than finishing his masterpiece and turning society upside-down. He hopes it is emboldened in a crisp serif, hiding in plain sight.

  “A number of prestigious scientists and sociologists hailed the so-called ‘evaporation stage’ as a monumental step in human evolution. Nobel Prize winner Johannes Freidman argued that, with popular access to the CLOUD, the ‘Omega Point [is] within grasp.’”

  Paul sips his rye, silently repeating “Omega Point” again and again to himself. The Anomaly might not necessarily be a malignancy; it could very well be an evolutionary catalyst.

  Nominally satisfied with at least one takeaway, Paul slouches forward, summoned by the growl of his stomach, and remote-controls the bean-encrusted extruder in the corner of the room. With a non-verbal demand for meat pie, the little machine jostles back and forth, making a variety of beeps and blurps, incarnating Paul’s four a.m. treat.

  “Senator Niles Winchester III’s Katajima-Sheffield team developed a mind space. This mind space is incomparable to early millennium media, as it offers users the option to pursue and engage in both linear and non-linear free-flows of visual, aural, and simulated-tactile experiences over a local network. This alternate reality, where minds and data converges, was deemed the ‘SHEF FIELD,’ named-so after its chief engineer, Dr. Paul Sheffield. After a scandalous breakdown, forcing Dr. Sheffield to retire from the project and Outland indefinitely, the project’s code-name became its official moniker: the CLOUD.

  “Owing to the unhindered transit of the mind through ideas, images, experiences, and at a later point, memories, CLOUD interaction destroyed barriers erected consciously and subconsciously by bias, geography, politics, language, and the myopia trained by subjective experience. The very first instance of its efficacy was demonstrated at the Cordoba Peace Talks where world leaders, having downloaded and shared the experiences of one another, found an agreeable diplomatic solution in record time.”

  Paul scans down, mumbling, “Blah, blah, blah.” A segment on dependency jumps out at him.

  “Recognizing the need for ways to give the human brain assistance in mediating all of the data experienced in the CLOUD, the Outland Corporation implemented server/broadcast towers (bomb-proof, high-security, ninety-storey fortresses full of active-flow hard drives) wherein CLOUD experiences could be stored. It soon became apparent that the invention and implementation of these data towers or ‘cypulchres’, simultaneously supported the human brain whilst rendering it an indefinite dependent.”

  Unsatisfied with the regurgitation of known-information, Paul resets his query. “CLOUD CONNECTION; PROCEDURE.”

  Thousands of results stream across Paul’s wall. He selects one at random. Several holograms beam out before him, depicting individuals receiving implants in bright, sterile rooms. A dozen other windows escape their frames, showing organic interaction with the implant in a hypothetical brain.

  “User receives implant at an Outpost station. This quick and painless procedure will result with an Outlander Z-Series fixture inserted into the brain. Three days after the insertion, the user must return to ensure that synthetic dendrites have formed along the implant barrier and have created linkages with the pertinent elements of the occipital lobe.

  “User negotiates a long- or short-term health plan with BiAnima to assure against mid-stream death, loss, or injury. Depending on the user’s preference, BiAnima can provide a PILOT device that carries out basic body functions on the user’s behalf while he or she is de-located. Some insurance plans enable the PILOT to perform menial tasks automatically while the host is mentally in the CLOUD. Deluxe packages also enable multi-processing, whereby the user can technically be aware and present in both the CLOUD and the material world simultaneously. The PILOT device also services an interior function: it indicates the day and the time to users in the CLOUD, additionally providing an in-feed from the outside.

  “Upon showing proof of a BiAnima subscription or V-insurance, the user can choose to pay for one, six, twelve, thirty-six, or forty-eight months of broadcast time in advance. Lifetime subscriptions will be honoured, but family and/or any dependents must be consulted first. Usually for lengthy subscriptions, Outland will insist on housing the subscriber’s body at a cypulchre or at an Outland hospice.

  “Once the user has reported proof of insurance, PILOT activity, and subscription, they are admitted access to the CLOUD.

  “Hot tip: prior to receiving the implant, select a memory, a special word, or a remote trigger, that you can use to prompt synchronization.

  “Upon synchronization, the implant is triggered. A feedback loop is created between the implant and the user’s exo-cortex, remotely stored in their local cypulchre. Their exo-cortex, or ‘memex’, is similarly synchronized with the CLOUD and their living-breathing self, completing the mental triangle.”

  Sprawled on the couch with an empty glass heaving up and down on his belly, Paul humours his self-pity. He closes all the windows on the wall-screen, and intuits a picture of Pythia and Angela. Should have stuck to cannaberettes. Rye always makes me weepy, he reminds himself.

  With a swipe of his hand, the Net-wall’s opacity drops to zero. Paul puts his glass down on the floor, and walks over to the window and into the embrace of the city light.

  Between Paul’s hotel room and the Blue Zone stretches an embankment of border-properties. Partyers from the Blue Zone come over to enjoy the unrestricted pleasures of the flesh that the RIM offers, provided by RIM ticks who keep their heads down and earn their keep. One building in particular catches Paul’s attention.

  On a rooftop across the gap from Paul’s, twenty or so yuppies roll off each other, glistening under holographics depicting a primeval California. Their projections of giant redwoods and sequoias reach about thirty feet above the rooftop before dissolving into the smog and exhaust threading through this part of the skyline. Drunk and undoubtedly high on smuggled SIMHAP, the tech-junkies lunge about their shared dream—scouting the nooks and crannies of the illusory forest.

  That’s how it ought to be, Paul concludes in his personal court. Tech to live, not live to tech.

  A police hover-car drifts between the redwoods, trawling a red-laser scan for bottom feeders, refugees, or any other kind of criminal who’d think a rooftop along the BZ/RIM border would be a good place to let loose. Likely prompted by a surprisingly dull scan, the car’s off, leaving the redwoods, waving in
the exhaust, to reform. The partyers resume their imaginary romp through the woods, Johnny Law’s presence no sooner gone than forgotten. The drugs that were anticipatorily ditched over the edge will soon find users in the sky-alleys. Nothing is wasted here, except for life and freedom.

  Paul steps out of the blue light, and heads for his bed. He sits on the edge, and digs his NEXUS chip out from under the mattress. Wobbling, he scrutinizes the basic, mean tech in the half-light.

  He can’t help but feel responsible for his daughters’ plight. Sulking in a sweat-stained costume, with alcohol and THC coursing through his veins, he is the rotten extreme they’ll leave behind. Their bodies will shrivel up as their minds balloon, and they will become gods, or, conversely, helpless slaves. No better than the hybrid rouging the back room at Q’s.

  What will become of Pythia, with her newly-acquired power to speak and the mind to command? In all the circumferential hurry to converge and connect, she will either rise about the herd or else schlep into some deviant archetype on the fringe, where she’ll ultimately be erased in the name of communion.

  Angela, loved and understood, will become a follower; a nodule on the leviathan—a nameless fleck on a beach, washed and rounded into sameness, oblivion. He’d wanted better for her, but…

  Rachel. She’d sacrificed them. My daughters. Why, after she’d agreed to protect the girls from the dangers of the noosphere? The notion of letting the world access their perfect little minds was anathema to the both of them. Why the sudden change of heart?

  Someone got to her, just like someone got to Q—like someone cancelled my prescriptions to derail me. Someone manipulated her, made her think the CLOUD was something besides the hell her ex-husband tried to seal-up. Someone with juice and avarice and intent.

  Katajima? Hard to say. Brutus had been pronged by a latent guilt. Why would he go after the girls? Leverage? Why’d he go after Q? Control? What good would a fragmentor be to him without the finished code?