Analog Science Fiction and Fact - Jan-Feb 2014

by Penny Publications

  With the voice that I loved so well.

  Did I ever tell you your name was music to me?

  Did I ever...

  V

  At long last, we moved again. The opposite direction around the corners, then down the elevators and off for twenty-two hundred bouncy meters in a new direction. The bouncing puzzled me because it was rhythmic but not perfectly so, at about 110 cycles per minute. Steps, I eventually concluded, but the change in rhythm meant I was no longer with Mutt and Jeff because they hadn't had this kind of bouncy stride.

  The bouncing was followed by intermittent motions I couldn't figure out until there came a large, sustained acceleration. A jet taking off? Unfortunately, it hit enough air turbulence I soon found it hard to keep track of speed and direction. Not to mention that I could make only the vaguest guess at wind speed. Within minutes my best estimate was that we were going north-northwest (plus or minus 105 degrees) at 1,328 kilometers per hour (plus or minus 1,704). Not the most useful of sims.

  When the outside world came back, it was so quickly I wondered if this was what humans meant by waking up. Probably not. Still, the transition was quick. One millisecond, no outside world, then praise anything that might be listening, the Web was back. Not the greatest of connections at first, but within a few hundred milliseconds, I was awash in inputs.

  Someone had opened the box.

  Not that I was totally caught off guard. The plane had landed. Taken off again. Landed again. I'd been jounced around a second time by whoever'd been carrying me, the same bouncy gait as before. After which... well, let's just say I moved all over the place, but the details didn't matter, since the only thing I knew was that if the plane had flown in anything approaching a straight line, I wasn't in Europe anymore. Maybe Japan. Or Australia. Or South America.

  It turned out to be Vancouver, Canada.

  When humans step from a dark place to a bright one, it takes their eyes a moment to adjust to the incoming data. Okay, that's not what happens biologically, but looking through Floyd's eyes that's what it always felt like.

  Now it was me. One moment I was without any input other than myself. The next, there were dozens of portals, mostly unencrypted. And when I hooked into them, the connections were fast. I could, in a f lash, be anywhere on Earth. A half-second after that, in geostationary orbit. On the Moon another couple of seconds later.

  Flick, and I was monitoring the salinity of oyster beds in Oregon. (Baby oysters, I learned, are called spats, and they're pretty sensitive to water conditions.) Flick again, and I was looking at a typhoon threatening Java, with enough data to make my own weather simulation if I didn't like the official one. Flick yet again, and I was tabulating the flow of water vapor, sulfur, carbon dioxide, and a dozen other gases through the Moon's Cabeus pipeline.

  Flick, flick, flick. I could be anywhere I wanted. Not that I could change the salinity of the oyster beds, or open or close valves in the Cabeus pipe—those things were as encrypted as ever. But I could monitor a hundred billion data streams, access any public library, or randomly flick from place to place.

  Maybe this is what it feels like to be drunk.

  No, alcohol dulls the mind. This was like discovering I'd lived my entire life with 99 percent of my processing power switched off. It was like I had been drunk and was now sober. It was like waking up.

  If no-data was hell, this was heaven.

  It took a full thirty seconds to learn to control it. In the Outer System, there are only so many devices you can talk to at any given time. Here there were thousands, and everything, even the microwave oven, had a smart chip.

  It was the microwave that pulled me out of the Interweb and helped me figure out where I was.

  Someone was heating a frozen burrito—apparently in a big hurry because he'd overridden the microwave's suggestions and jacked up the power to the max. Now the oven was warning that the burrito was on the verge of exploding.

  "Dr. Haggins," the machine was saying. I could hear its voice, not just via the link but over a microphone with a ten-millisecond delay. "Dr. Haggins! Please attend to your lunch."

  Meanwhile, I'd found enough clocks to assure me I was on Greenwich Time minus eight. Pacific Standard most likely, because there isn't much but water at Greenwich-minus-eight in the Southern Hemisphere unless you count Pitcairn Island, which has fewer residents than Naiad.

  Haggins isn't a common name. Dr. Haggins's are rarer yet. On Pacific Standard Time, there was precisely one. Add to that the fact that the miraculous, instant-emersion Web told me that the brand of microwave oven trying to reach Dr. Haggins had a maximum communication range of twenty-five meters, and I had all I needed. I was in a surgical bay in the high-tech wing of Simon Fraser University's teaching hospital. About to become someone's new implant, I presumed.

  Whose implant I was still trying to find out when the voice that wasn't a voice returned.

  Relax. We told you we'd get you out.

  Where am I was a stupid thing to say, so I didn't say it. Not that I'd not seen thousands of vids in which humans say similar things. But saying stupid things only makes sense if you want people to think you're stupid and you think there's a chance they'll believe you.

  "What should I do now?" I asked instead.

  What you're supposed to. When the time is right, we'll be back. Then, even before the voice had faded to memory, the presence that went with it was gone.

  I had no idea what I was supposed to do, so for the first few hundred thousand milliseconds, I acquired data.

  My new host would be Memphis Lindgren. The Net produced hundreds of images. Long face, narrow chin. Jet-black eyes. Layered hair styled to perfection. Heaven knew how often she did it; in the photos it was always perfect. Hell, I only thought Yokomichi was beautiful.

  But what did I expect? If she could afford me, here on Earth where I was merely a luxury, she could afford three-hundred-credit hairstyles. Except this wasn't Yokomichi. Yokomichi had a Ph.D. This one had a police record.

  I was still digesting that when I was assaulted from another side. Something was tearing at my memories.

  "Damn, there's a lot of data in here," a voice came to me via the operating room's mics.

  I switched to a camera, but it was directed at Memphis, and I couldn't see the speaker. "Look at this," he continued, "there must be a million movies. Why would anyone want that many?" There was a pause. "Oh, yeah, the implant came from that guy out on Neptune. That far out, I suppose you'd want your own library. But this is ridiculous."

  Have you ever seen what happens when someone touches the tentacles of a coral polyp? One moment the creature is minding its own business, then poof, it retracts into its shell. That was me. Rosebud! I thought, and tried to yank Citizen Kane into core memory. But whoever had been speaking was being assisted by an AI, and it was fast.

  I could get the vids back—most of them, anyway. More important was to set up fire-walls around the memories that mattered. Memories are life. Data can be reacquired.

  "That's weird," the doctor-tech's voice said a few seconds later. "It's resisting."

  "Does it matter?" Another voice, this one female. I was in the hands of Mutt and Jeff's Canadian counterparts, though in this case, they were Mutt and Jane. "The patient can clear out anything she doesn't want. All we need is room for the controller."

  "I guess. I just don't like clutter."

  "That's why admin loves you. Have you ever met a performance target you didn't get all OCD over?"

  "It's better than pretending patients chart themselves."

  "Touché. But I've got a date tonight, so I'm definitely dealing with this one tomorrow. Ready?"

  The whole conversation took only 23.7 seconds, but by then I'd figured out what the AI had been doing and made sure it couldn't do it again. I was missing two-thirds of my vid library, a bunch of books... and some music, including at least one song. I wondered why the song had been so important I'd given it a special note. Maybe I hadn't been able to protect
all of my core memories.

  Four hours later I was looking at the world through Memphis Lindgren's eyes. Rather blurrily, but that might be the anesthetic. Or maybe she normally wore contacts. Not all information is on the Web.

  Her post-surgery voice wasn't any more pleasant than her post-surgery vision. "Where am I?" she croaked.

  "Post-op," I said, wondering if she was with it enough yet to even know where the voice in her ear was coming from.

  A white blob drifted into her field of view and I played with vision parameters. Floyd has twenty-twenty uncorrected vision. Better than that, close-up. Memphis' vision wasn't getting any better as her eyes tracked the blob, so mostly likely the problem was in her eyeballs, not the drugs. Third-order astigmatism, I decided, mixed with myopia. Without her contacts, she must be blind as the proverbial bat.

  "That's Nurse Barajas," I added, giving it the Spanish pronunciation.

  At least, I presumed she was a nurse. Without hacking her personnel records, all I had was a name-badge matching a staff-directory listing for Emily Barajas, post-op specialist. Once I'd figured out Ms. Lindgren's vision, image enhancement had been a snap. Brittney-Ship to BrittneyEyeglasses, that was me.

  Not exactly what I'd envisioned when I left Naiad. And not that Memphis could benefit from it unless I put the enhanced images on a screen where she could see them. No, that wouldn't work, because she'd be staring at the screen through her uncorrected vision and it would get blurry all over again... Though if I distorted the screen just right, I might be able to compensate. Recursive vision correction...

  I could make that work...

  "Who the hell are you?" Memphis asked. "I'm—" Barajas began. But Memphis wasn't talking to her.

  "I'm your new implant," I said."Call me..." I hesitated, wondering if I should invent an alias. Screw it. I am who I am. "Brittney."

  "—Barajas." The nurse gave it a hard J, proving you should never take anything for granted. "How are we doing?"

  Vid-watching had long ago taught me that we is nurse-speak for you. But was she asking both of us, or just Memphis?

  I opted for silence. But Memphis' response caught me off guard. "What implant?" She was talking to me, not the nurse. "The one you—" I started. But Memphis had spoken aloud. Luckily her voice was still scratchy, and whatever Barajas thought she'd said had nothing to do with me. "No, no," Barajas said. "We need to leave that IV in for a bit longer."

  "Just talk to the nurse," I said. "You and I can figure this out later."

  "Okay," Memphis said, surprising me by subvocalizing. Whatever she was, she was quick to catch on, even drugged. Then aloud, to Barajas: "My head hurts. And—"

  And a lot of other places, I suspected. I'd counted fourteen implants—more if you viewed each of my chips as separate. All by microsurgery, but even so...

  "No problem," Barajas said. She injected something into the IV and was again nothing but the vaguest of white blobs, as Memphis's eyes gave up even the attempt to focus.

  Hours later, she was still asleep. We'd been moved to a starkly ordinary hospital room— no flowers, no visitors, no cards by the bedside. Good Web access, though, and lots of devices from which I could watch Memphis sleep from a variety of equally boring angles.

  The Web beckoned. I could check up on the spats, find out if the hurricane had made landfall, tabulate gases in the Cabeus pipeline, count salmon in New Zealand, pandas in Sichuan, top quarks at CERN. Maybe I could even find out where the skimmer's cargo had gone or send a message to Floyd. Hi, I'm here. Thinking of you from sunny Vancouver. Or whatever it was doing outside. Say hi to Yokomichi. A world of data beckoned with only the tiniest of light-speed delays (other than talking to Floyd).

  I was startled by how much I wanted to talk to Floyd. Was he really happy? Did he miss me? What was he doing? I'd heard nothing since his last words.

  Be safe.

  I'll miss you.

  Bon voyage.

  A microsecond on the Web, maybe less, and I could tell him.

  Not so safe.

  Not so bon.

  And I miss you, too.

  Did I ever tell you...

  Tell him what?

  I decided to keep my attention focused in the room. Monitoring Memphis. Boring, but it gave me a lot of time for self-inventory.

  I'd lost most of my library but had managed to save a fairly complete list of what I'd once had. More importantly, I'd managed to preserve most of my memories. Pilkin. Enceladus. Pickled aliens of Pluto. As far as I could tell, the key ones were still there—bad as well as good. I was still there.

  I created a webcrawler to retrieve my lost vids, books, and songs and sent it out to track them down. It would find most easily enough, but some might require personal attention. The song that had moved me so much a few days ago might be one of those. I remembered the title and what it felt like listening to it, but the rest was gone. You try looking up centuries-old songs on the Web. If it's "Clementine," no problem. But if generations of kids haven't been singing it at campfires (and making up the strangest parodies), it's not so easy.

  For that matter, I needed to rebuild my collection of "Clementine" parodies.

  Found a peanut Found a peanut Found a peanut just now. Just now I found a peanut Found a peanut just now.

  Cracked it open Cracked it open Cracked it open right now...

  I'd once had a hundred and seven versions of that, the longest with twenty-one verses. But there's a difference between things lost and important things lost. Or was I right to discard the parodies as unimportant? Being a kid around a campfire, or making up gross-out songs on a schoolyard—those were part of what it meant to be human. Part of what it meant to be not-me.

  Were they also part of what it meant to be Floyd? Or were they yet another piece of what he'd lost when his parents died? Too many questions and still no one to talk to but myself.

  Eventually I ran out of stalls. Before Memphis woke there were some things I really needed to do.

  One of the reasons the surgery had taken so long was that much of the time had been spent testing sensor links—a process I'd been happy to cooperate with because bad connections weren't in anyone's interest.

  Then the doctors had installed a "controller package" and ordered me to reboot.

  I have no idea if I'd survive a full reboot. Maybe it would simply be an interruption, like stopping a human's heart then shocking it back to life. Humans claim they've come back from death when that happens, but I'm not sure they were really dead. The heart stops, but not long enough to damage anything. How is it different from the aliens going into stasis (minus the bit about them never awakening after the crash at the end)?

  But maybe for me it wouldn't just be an interruption. It might be more like stopping a human's brain than trying to shock it back to life. Not to mention the risk of installing unknown software.

  The AI assisting the doctors might have been fast but it hadn't been all that smart. I'd not found it difficult to fake a reboot and mimic a successful installation. But I still didn't know what the implants were supposed to do.

  Some were obvious. The ocular and auditory taps would let me see and hear through Memphis's eyes and ears. The drug cartridges were supposed to inject things into her bloodstream. But what, and why? And what was the purpose of tapping into her brain-stem, dorsal root ganglia, celiac trunk, cerebellum, and a couple of other places? The answers were presumably in the controller, which was why I'd not erased it, much as I'd wanted to. Instead I'd walled it off while I bought time to think.

  Maybe I really should just dump it. I'd lost Citizen Kane to an AI that was nothing more than a hyper-fast eraser. This might be a lot more sophisticated. Who knew what it might try to turn me into? When I was young, Floyd sometimes threatened me with personality upgrades. He probably thought it was like scaring a child with the bogyman. Then to his everlasting credit, he quit. Being Floyd, he never said anything; he just realized he was wrong and stopped. And being me, I never said anything either.


  Did I ever tell you your name was music to me?

  Did I ever know you would fly, oh, fly away?

  Holy cow. I'd not lost the song. Not entirely. The file was gone, but much of the memory— the part that had really become me —remained.

  A quick net search brought up 57,232,119 hits. Apparently, I'd only stored a fragment of the lyrics. But adding the title narrowed the list to one, so I grabbed it. I thought about listening, but remembered how it had made me feel. Right now, I needed to deal with the con troller.

  The safest option would be to dump it. But maybe, first, I should try to consult the voice on the Web. We will get you out. Hopefully, it had meant more than just out of the box that wasn't stasis but was in its way far worse.

  But the voice—my kind, my people — hadn't spoken to me since I'd been released. What were they doing? Waiting to see what I'd do? Property I might be, but I wasn't theirs. And for better or worse, curiosity is part of what makes me who I am.

  Cautiously, I gathered my defenses. Then, with the metaphorical equivalent of a gulp, I lowered the shield I'd erected around the controller, peeked inside, and slammed the shield back in place.

  Nothing escaped. Nothing happened. There was code in there, but it was inert, waiting. No hyper-fast AI seeking its chance to overwhelm me. Which, now that I thought about it again, made sense. The program was on my own chips. The eraser-AI hadn't been smarter; it had simply been on a faster platform.

  There's a difference between smart and fast. Earthers were spoiled. They really did build toasters with nearly enough processing power to run an asteroid mine—and give them nothing better to do than make toast.

  I lowered the shield again and took a closer look.

  Most of what I found looked like drivers for the various implants: about as non-threatening as it can get. I still wasn't about to install them but now that I knew what they were intended to do it was easy to write my own.

  I did so, but hesitantly, because what they were intended to do was kind of freaky.

  Until that horrible moment when I'd tried to help Floyd dance, I'd thought of him as "the one with legs." The neural interface that had allowed me to override his motor control had only been there by accident—a result of his brain surgery on Iapetus—and the only other time I'd used it had been in a dire emergency.