Collective Mind

by Klyukin, Vasily

  “There’s no need to hurry with the money, Monsieur Leroy, but nonetheless we have to be ready to carry out the operation,” the doctor concluded, said goodbye and hung up.

  Isaac was almost shaking.

  “She could have died, and I put off offloading my energy until the last moment. Unforeseen circumstances – that moron of a terrorist could have cost Vicky her life. I didn’t even keep a single day in reserve! What an idiot I was! More stupid than any Veggie!

  “I hate COMA.” Isaac thought. “They have everything they need to cure people – the technologies, the methodologies, the high-class specialists – and all of that thanks to sucking creativity out of people like me.”

  His thoughts suddenly took an aggressive turn: “But no one benefits from it all because the treatment has to be paid for. Until we go to that freaking COMA to sell our creativity, people, our nearest and dearest, just keep getting worse!”

  Aggressiveness is a form of helplessness, it surfaces when you can’t find the right words to express your feelings.

  What was going on? The media were choked solid with praise for UNICOMA. The whole world was rejoicing at the rosy forecasts of a happy future for mankind. Problems were being solved, scientists had been given answers to their questions, and solutions had been found for the technical puzzles. Even the people who became total Veggies after offloading their creativity were happy and looked content.

  No one paid any special attention any longer to terrorist attacks, like the one Isaac had got involved with yesterday. They were regarded as no more than disorderly conduct. Even the police ignored the feeble street protests. Solitary messiahs, protest graffiti – there were always plenty of mental cases and petty hooligans around. These troublemakers claimed we should be afraid of the power held by UNICOMA. Some opposition scientists claimed that pooled creativity was only useful to make progress, the kind of projects where some prior work had already been done in the past. 1. Not even a billion of HIT, they said, could be helpful to start novel ventures of the future, such as conquering deep space or curing future viruses. Thanks to Collective Mind, people could accelerate research and bring it to a conclusion more quickly, but without prior developments, pooled creativity was useless. Teleportation might seem like science fiction, but in the middle of the last century, the smartphone was pure science fiction too.

  New questions were being left unanswered and the society was growing more stupid. At this rate of downloading there would soon be no one left to ask questions. All of it was justified by populist claims that the diseases that had been conquered saved people’s lives today, whereas critics and retrogrades could always be found.

  Orange Energy sucked out of people would never be able to do what its original owners could – it wasn’t capable of asking a new question, creating a dream, inventing a new fantasy. Only human beings could do that. “Nonetheless,” objected the experts from the UN, “there’s no guarantee that a man who holds on his creativity would make rational use of it by himself. We still have to reap the full benefits of the revolutionary leap forward that the world has made, readjust. Let’s harvest the scores of new inventions that Collective Mind will produce, and deal with the problems later. We’re studying them, but their number is miniscule in comparison with the thousands of supremely important successful new developments that we have.” The success of UNICOMA was well protected by the armor plating of a host of useful technologies.

  “Supremely important,” Isaac spat out angrily. His hand reached out for a cigarette. “But I don’t smoke!” In stressful moments, Isaac’s old reflex of fumbling on the table with his hand for a pack of cigarettes sometimes came back.

  He tried to pull himself together. “Get on the computer Isaac, they told you there’s still time. You can earn the money you need to pay for your sister’s surgery from the V-Rain. Then there’ll be enough for a decent human life too. Use the chance you’ve got! The doctors still don’t have a full picture! Just get on with the work like a grown-up while there is still time! And don't forget: long comas may bring a permanent damage”

  His rage and the pain inside his head made it hard to focus on his work, nauseated and choked him, interfered with concentrating on the little device. He recalled Pierre, the young guy he talked to at COMA. “Shit,” he thought, “I hope he’ll be all right and won’t try to turn himself into a vegetable again in exchange for worthless bits of paper. The two of us have been given a second chance.”

  What the heck was going on here? Isaac slammed his hand down on the mouse in annoyance. The plastic cracked, but thank God the mouse still worked.

  “One thing the terrorist was right about is that the people who run COMA and sit on all these inventions have too much power. It’s naïve to think there’ll always be a decent man in charge, those who are cunning and unscrupulous fight their way to the top easier. Someday soon, maybe tomorrow, a potential dictator will take over; a tyrant, who will consolidate his power and flush all the opposition down the tubes. They surely must have more serious weapons than the ones they give their peacekeepers. They’ll hack the internet with their program filters and tighten their control over the press that they’ve already got on a leash. Their bank is already the most powerful and there will be a new empire of Veggies. Well, certainly the more unquestioningly loyal Veggies there are, the simpler it is to rule.

  “In all the futuristic films, there always has to be an omnipotent corporation or empire. Essentially that is the model of the future world. Of course, no one ever thought the dragon would emerge from the UN. The more Veggies there are, the more docile the world is. The total elimination of crime has weeded out a whole mass of freedom-loving individuals who were beyond their control. Tomorrow they’ll call anyone opposed to UNICOMA a criminal. And then there are the people who don’t understand a thing, even though they’re not Veggies, take that Pierre for instance,” – Isaac’s thoughts turned back once again to yesterday’s miserable youngster.

  Isaac had no idea that Pierre was on the highest peak of elation because of the attention lighted on him from the media. Alas that wouldn’t stay with Pierre for long. Sooner or later the small windfall of fame that came his way thanks to the real man of the hour, Mr. Elvis, would evaporate.

  Something else had come Isaac’s way – not fame, but a piece of the board from the central computer. As he tried to focus his mind on his work, Isaac toyed with it, intending to throw it out as he had promised himself to do. After his reflections about UNICOMA, Isaac felt a certain respect for Elvis’s audacity. He had to conserve his own energy and not waste his breath on idle talk and promises, especially if it wasn’t all that difficult to make them into reality. Isaac looked at the piece of board again – it had a couple of microchips and a mini-memory card on it. A mini-card, but with a big memory, and it wasn’t a fragment at all, it was complete and undamaged. Happy to do anything but work, Isaac decided to take a look at what was on it.

  He plugged it into his own computer and saw a mass of folders with files and tables. He opened the first one and froze, dumbfounded. His intuition or maybe it was that special energy of his hadn’t let him down. He was looking at a table of people who had been tested, but had not yet downloaded their creativity. First names, surnames, IQs, creativity ratings and other data. Isaac leaned closer to the monitor and quickly ran his eyes over the confidential lines.

  “Holy shit! Didn’t that crazy hobo say: ‘Destroy this heart of the devil’? He wasn’t all that far from the truth, that Elvis.”

  The memory card contained a whole heap of incomprehensible information, but the most interesting things on it were the various ratings. This wasn’t the devil’s heart, it was his database! Isaac’s fatigue instantly evaporated. His fingers flew over the keyboard, he avidly devoured the content. “Lord, what do you want me to do with his?” he thought to himself.

  Chapter two

  Isaac’s hands hovered motionless above the keys. Destroying something was easy, if you knew for sure what actually
was to be destroyed. Isaac had come into possession of a database, but what was the right way to deal with this knowledge from out of the blue?

  “What if I search the table for names I know?” thought Isaac, in earnest excitement.

  Isaac opened the file named Human Imagination Tone. First, he decided to try his own name, typed it in and launched the search. “I’m not in the top hundred, but I made the top thousand, marked with five little yellow stars; 996 that is,” he grinned to himself. His next search was for “Jeremy Link”. There was a lot of empty chatter available on the internet about the professor, but there was no serious open information.

  The search engine found Jeremy Link. Wow! The name was in a separate table with the striking title “Top 50 geniuses” The genius top list, no less! And these were people who have not donated their energy!

  Isaac ran through the list eagerly. In the third place was a well-known Russian mathematician, who worked at MIT. He cracked complicated theorems like nuts and was famous for always refusing money prizes for his achievements. What had jogged him into filling in a form to sell his creativity? Isaac found the answer to that question in the “Remarks” section, where it said that the mathematician needed to raise money for medical treatment for his child who had a rare brain disease. Isaac gritted his teeth at this coincidence with his own sister. Isaac’s fury with COMA overwhelmed him. It would never release him now.

  Vicky was Isaac’s stepsister, but she was the nearest and dearest person he had. No matter how hard Isaac tried, he couldn’t clearly recall the moment when he first met Vicky. What did his mother tell him, what did he say to her? He remembered being introduced to a frightened little girl in a blue dress. And that it was a good day, because he was given a radio-controlled car. And a bit later Vicky’s dad – his mum’s friend, as he was introduced at the time – bought Isaac a really great bike. Then he started coming round more and more often, together with Vicky. Playing with someone, even with a girl, was better than playing on your own. On the weekends Vicky’s dad drove them to the amusement park and bought them big ice creams, and there was no reason to be afraid of someone like him. Isaac quickly got used to him and was glad when he came, always with a present, even if only a little one. Isaac was delighted when he and his mum moved into his apartment, where Isaac and Vicky had their own room.

  They grew up like that together, went summer camps and the amusement parks together. Then to school, to the parties at school, and then to the discotheques.

  Vicky was probably the most important thing in his life. She was always really considerate and cool. He could always talk about everything with Vicky. The years went by and Isaac shared with her the stories of his love affairs, and she complained about her boyfriends. He told her about his inventions and the problems he had making progress with them, and she listened closely and encouraged her brother, and wouldn’t let him give up. And Vicky used to laugh and say that he was her very best girlfriend, who wouldn’t even look at the same boy as she.

  Isaac felt a need to think about something different, because sooner or later his thoughts about Vicky would come to the time when she fell ill. He drove away his memories and went back to the data base.

  Isaac focused on another famous name, the inventor of the unique search engine “Piquet”. Johnson Pike lived in Beverly Hills and was a very rich man. He got rich after launching his search engine, with a totally new approach to the analysis of results.

  The usual search engines were focused on the amount of site traffic, and a lot of traffic automatically made a site important and ranked it high in the ratings. In the first lines of the located data, users saw the most popular sites, not the reference that they needed. The information they were looking for was either hidden away somewhere in the last pages, or was never even located at all.

  Piquet was better and faster at finding results for given search parameters. The algorithm for the results of analysis was complicated and, of course, wasn’t made public. Specialists assumed that the search engine analyzed all the words on each site found. If there were too many words, that meant it wasn’t a professional site, but some kind of encyclopedia, news portal or resource page. Piquet assigned credibility to sites on the basis of the frequency of the search words relative to the total number and the presence of specific, strictly professional terms and phrases. At least, that was what the manual claimed. Paranoiacs claimed that the search engine also analyzed the files on the computer of the user who launched a search, in order to figure out what he did and rank the results more accurately.

  Apart from everything else, Pike was a superb PR man. In his numerous interviews about the search engine and his company, the inventor frequently toyed with the journalists, only talking about what he wanted and cracking jokes, including dirty ones. At one press conference he put eight penguins in the front row, and he arrived to another wearing an astronaut’s suit. In the first case he announced that he wanted to see a decently dressed audience at the conference, and in the second case that he had been searching for an answer to a very difficult question out in space – and found it. The journalists loved and hated him at the same time. On the one hand, he was rude, but Pike only attacked people in response to an attack, never overstepping a thin boundary line, plus he threw fantastic parties, at which he was always very hospitable and generous. In any case, he was a newsmaker, and no one quarreled with him openly. After all, tomorrow he might block your name in his search engine, and you would instantly be consigned to journalistic oblivion.

  Late last year the extravagant Pike had put on yet another show, in which he jumped off the roof of a skyscraper in Los Angeles—into the sunset—on a yellow hang-glider with “Search in Piquet” written on it. And five big stars. The journalists outdid each other in inventing catchy headlines. A superb banquet was laid out for them on the roof. The next day the wings of the bright-yellow hang-glider appeared on the front pages of all the major newspapers and news sites.

  Everybody was really surprised when Pike announced he had decided to download his creativity. At the test session, to which he invited the press, he said that his creativity level was off the scale and declared emotionally that from now on his imagination would serve the good of society.

  However, before offloading his energy, he was required to hand over the Piquet algorithm to the company’s board of directors and wind up all activities that required intellectual energy. In the table it said that the downloading of Pike’s creativity had been postponed once again. Probably it had just been another of his PR moves, so he could announce to the press how high his level was.

  Isaac clicked the mouse on other tables in the data base. He went into the top 100 of those who had already downloaded their creativity. Among them he recognized the name of a celebrated artist, Andrei Sharov. He was a Veggie now, he didn’t make art any more, but the pictures he had created became world-famous.

  Isaac recalled the story that had been all over the media. The artist, solitary and unsociable, never left his studio, scraping by on occasional sales of his pictures, which were not especially popular. Not a single serious art gallery wanted to take him on. After all, you see, he hadn’t invented anything conceptually new, had he? He burned down the garage containing his unsold works and was one of the first to download. His creativity index turned out to be astronomical. Of course, they wrote about it in all the newspapers. The artist’s works were suddenly noticed, and the rush started. His few remaining works were declared masterpieces, and not a single critic dared to say anything derisive about them anymore. The owner of a tiny local restaurant, who took pity on the artist and used to feed him in return for his pictures, received a lot of money for them. The six works hanging in the dark little restaurant ended up moving to the National Gallery and they even brought the artist to the opening. Only he didn’t care any longer about the fame that had suddenly descended on him.

  Isaac went back to the table that included Link. Where was he now, this professor? Isaac wanted to meet Li
nk face to face and tell him what he thought about him. All about UNICOMA, and the Veggies, and people like Isaac, who were stuck on the sidelines of life. Link probably read the avalanche of ecstatic articles about him, so let him hear a different opinion for a change. Isaac wondered why he had disappeared and why he was hiding. He ought to be held accountable for what he had done, and for what was happening now, and for what it would all lead to in the future. What did he think now that his invention had been at work for seven years?

  The ideal thing would be to make him destroy the system for integrating creativity. If he knew how then he would need to convince him, pressure him or ultimately threaten him. The world was turning into a new goddamned Matrix, only not in the movies, but for real. Isaac recalled the old film with Keanu Reeves. People seemed to be alive, but they were asleep, they lived in cocoons, in illusions, believing that their world was real. What real point was there in being born, living a quiet life, always toeing the line, and dying? In erasing your individuality?

  If Link had managed to build his invention, he would surely be able to destroy it. Destroying is easier than building if one knows what to destroy. The technology was classified and hard to get at, but Link ought to know how to do it.

  Isaac went back to the previous file that mentioned his name and scrolled up and down, then up again. The names of creativity-carriers who, like him, had their levels measured, but haven’t yet been downloaded. And as it happened, there were quite a lot of them.

  Isaac winced at the title ‘Creativity Carriers’, “What kind of crap was that name? They’re just normal people who have not sacrificed their singularity. They had to realize what Isaac had discovered about Coma. Maybe they have already realized that? Maybe they have known it a long time ago, and Isaac was the only one who had taken so long to see the light? Today they download creativity, tomorrow people’s sense of humor, memory, emotions? The dismemberment of a person’s individuality.