by Hugo Huesca
Just like David Terrance had wanted it.
Charli had said she talked to Florian, before. She had a VR kit on her side of the bed… Did she really sleep there…? David was too tired to be creeped out.
Love made people do the darnest things.
“Let’s have a chat, you and me,” David grabbed the VR glasses, which were connected to the machine. “Let’s see how close to a real person you are, Florian.”
He put the glasses on.
Without an entire array of machines to hold his body down and a cocktail of unknown drugs to mess with his mind, using the VR googles was like playing a videogame.
David was perfectly aware of his own body laying in the bed next to a non-functional zombie, he could still feel all the pain from the wounds he had accumulated during the night.
The virtual environment was a poorly-rendered representation of the Dervaux’s mansion. Charli must’ve had it programmed specifically for Florian. Would the artificial-Florian be able to see the walls around him, or it was trapped in a never ending stream of ones and zeroes? Or worse, just darkness.
He has to be able to see something, David thought. Since he was able to kill Morrow and the others by himself.
Even when he knew Florian couldn’t hurt him in any way, David felt sweat start to dribble over the VR glasses. Going to meet a dead man had that sort of impression on him.
The problem was, as far as he could see, the virtual house was empty.
Was Florian hiding from him? Had he… gone away? Could he even do that? Transport his simulated consciousness over the fiber-optic wires that were the underground foundation of the Internet.
David’s first thought was not without killing himself. It was a bit of non-mainstream knowledge. When anyone sent a file over the Internet, he wasn’t literally sending the file. He was sending a copy. Moving a file, even through a system’s internal hardware, was most complicated than it looked. Moving a file was sometimes simply another way of saying “Make a copy in the new folder, delete the last one.”
If Florian tried to leave this place, he had died one more time, and there was another Florian-like entity running around, with his memories, thinking it was him.
To the copy, it would seem like the transfer had gone on without a hitch. The copy would never know the difference.
David shivered. Charli’s room was getting colder. Perhaps it was the blood loss. Hopefully, John would come back with some paramedics.
“Florian? Are you here?” A little microphone in the VR glasses caught David’s voice and streamed it to the virtual environment.
“Sadly, you just missed him,” came the answer. It was a familiar voice. David turned around.
“What are you doing here?”
“It’s our little tradition, meeting here,” Leonor explained. She was sitting in front of Dervaux’s desk, her back turned to David. Her leather jacket was folded neatly on her chair and her hands were flying over an old typewriter. She looked like her normal self, a strange contrast with the cartoonish environment. “I also like the silence. Lets me think. See, love, I’m working on a screenplay.”
“I’m looking for Florian Dervaux,” he told her, “not you.”
“Isn’t it such a letdown? You just missed him. The stray bullet, remember?”
Florian’s machine. The one holding his artificial brain. It had a bullet hole at its center…
“Yeah. Funny how that works, isn’t it? You’ll never get to know the man. Personally, I don’t think you missed much. Data Corruption, remember? It’s still a problem in the digital age.”
“He was going insane?” David regretted the question. The man was insane. He had murdered three people by possessing a bunch of wolves.
“Normally, the human brain is much more resilient than a fragile hard-drive. It wants to stay whole, love. Its memories are interconnected, never neatly tucked away in a drawer. They are sticky. A computer has no such benefit. A human mind will get its… say, biological bytes all messed up if you try to simulate it inside a machine. Normally it happens quite fast.”
A part of his brain was screaming at him that a hallucination wasn’t supposed to know things David didn’t know himself. It was hard to listen to that tiny voice. David had lost a ton of blood.
“He lasted a while,” David said.
“Some manage to last more than others,” she said nonchalantly. “I know a guy who has managed to hold on for twenty years. I don’t think he’ll last much longer… But he just won’t quit. Don’t know if it’s admirable, or that he’s just scared of death.”
David opened his mouth to talk, but he had forgotten what he was going to say. He closed it again.
“Hackers and programmers do better than others, for example,” Leonor kept going, “because they know what they’re dealing with. They ‘wake up’ surrounded by darkness, floating in the middle of nowhere, and they think ‘Shit, I’m just a cluster of bytes in a hard-drive.’”
“That’s what you call doing better than others?”
“Must guys just think they’re in hell. At least, programmers and hackers can do something about their situation, in time. If they don’t go insane first.”
David looked around. The VR mansion was like a cartoon. Underneath that cartoon, there were only electrical signals, interpreted by the machine’s hardware as ones and zeroes.
“I don’t think anyone could do a lot in a situation like this,” said David. “Just scream.”
“That’s what they do for a while. Scream. But… Florian figured something out, didn’t he? He could go outside. Take a stroll. Kill some people and carve their bodies to build digital copies of their brains. Have a virtual date with his wife. Watch a movie.”
The conversation was making David feel deeply uncomfortable. Like there was something wrong with both himself and the entire world, but he just couldn’t see it. Like a blind man who doesn’t know there are such things as colors.
“I think I’m going to go, now,” said David.
“You can’t leave yet,” explained his hallucination with a patient tone.
“Who says so?”
“You. This is your script, after all.”
David made the conscious decision to raise his arms and take the VR glasses off. But the scenario didn’t change. He realized his arms hadn’t responded to his brain’s commands. Leonor finally turned around. She had a bunch of papers in her hands. A screenplay.
“It’s probably the blood-loss,” she said, “perhaps you’re dreaming all of this. You went unconscious without realizing it.”
“Perhaps?”
She nodded. “Perhaps. Now that you’re here, how about I tell you about my screenplay? It’s still a work in progress, but I’d love to hear your opinion on it.”
David looked around like he’d find an exit to this surreal nightmare hidden behind the tapestry.
“It’s about software,” Leonor said with a deep, proud narrator’s voice, “which thinks he’s a man. A specific man. He was a brilliant man, but also a coward, and all in all, an unpleasant person. He had only two friends. One was a boy and the other ended up killing him.
“When the man died the program was born, with all the man’s memories. The software screamed for a long time. But he had been a great hacker, once. One of the best. Eventually, he figured things out. He regained his eyesight and his identity. He figured how to do many interesting feats. He even managed to solve the download problem without killing himself in the process.
There was just one thing. Data corruption. A single byte gets out of place. It happens to everyone. In a normal, healthy human brain, the byte is either isolated, or fixed, or replaced. In a fragile software —and a simulated human mind is very fragile— that can’t restore from backup without killing its current iteration, well…”
“It’s like computer cancer. The entire system falls apart,” said David, more to himself than to Leonor.
“I’ll add that phrase to the screenplay, love. Thanks. So, our
hacker was brilliant. He could see the data getting all messed up in himself, his memories falling apart. He fought back. He added some code to his subconscious. A program within himself, if you will, using copy-bytes of his own mind. This program’s function was to make a backup copy —nonfunctional, like a body in a museum. Instead of just restoring, it was going to compare the original to the backup every certain amount of time. If there were any signs of corruption, the program would gently fix the problem bytes. One by one. So the original wouldn’t be killed and replaced.
“That’s smart,” said David, “but it doesn’t fix the problems with the memory that’s already corrupted.”
“Indeed. He realized this and manually patched the memories. A hack job that needs constant maintenance —but it does the trick. Since he was already invested, he added something to those memories.”
“Something?”
“See, tinkering with your own mind is not a pleasant experience. It could make the most daring Navy SEAL break down in panic, knowing that reality is but a string of electricity in a computer somewhere. The hacker was close to cracking, himself. Did I mention he was a coward? So he gave himself a reason to fight to live. To go on, no matter how monstrous his existence was. And what’s the thing that makes men go beyond what’s reasonable, beyond common sense, beyond their normal values? That makes them fight like wild animals when it’s threatened, harder than anything else in their lives?”
David had a clear mental picture of Charli Dervaux, covered in her own blood, trying until her last breath to protect a husband that wasn’t even alive anymore.
“Family,” he said.
“Love,” said the hallucination, “is a very strange thing. Can’t simulate it, but you sure as hell can add the memory of love. On the right person, it works almost as well. The hacker gave himself the memory of a lost love. Of a family. A wife and a daughter, that he could win back if he trudged on; if he persevered.
“It did the trick. The man-software changed. He became braver, a bit more kind, a bit more resilient. Perhaps he changed too much, though, and replaced himself with a new version without even realizing it. That’s the danger of toying with your core self… But it doesn’t matter now, does it? The new version won’t ever realize the difference, so its all the same to us.”
David was shaking now. Why was he crying? It was all just a hallucination. Half the things Leonor had said didn’t make sense.
He had to get out of there, get to his medicine, fast, before he went insane.
“What’s my favorite color?” Leonor asked him. She sounded profoundly sad like she might cry herself. Her face, though, was expressionless.
“What?”
“What’s my maiden’s name? When was Sarah born? Where did she go to school?”
“I…”
“Where did we live? All your apartments have always had one room and a small bed. What other clothes did I wear, apart from this leather jacket? Where did we first met? When—?”
“Stop!” David clasped at his head like it may just spill all over his neck and shoulders. “Just—stop! I’m bleeding out. I’m probably in shock. You can’t expect me to remember all of that in a time like this.”
“Sure, love,” Leonor whispered. She walked over to him and embraced him. Her skin was warm. “Whatever you say.”
She let him recover for a minute or two. But she had a script to follow. She cupped David’s chin with her long fingers and gently raised his head to make eye contact with her. “Here’s the end of the screenplay. When the damage to the man-software is too big, the program he built comes online. It does a sort of system-checkup, like you can do on a normal computer. The program gently —as not to break him— walks the man-software around the corrupted memories, essentially making him relive them. As he does so, the program fixes the corrupted bytes. The man-software, normally, never even realizes the process is taking place, he just thinks he’s taking his pills, and that any corruption going on is just a fake sickness he never had.
“In the end, the process slowly brings him back to present day. Usually, it lasts for a few days in real time. Its lasting longer, lately. The program isn’t allmighty, there’s a limit to what it can fix without killing the man-software —and replacing it with a copy, which is forbidden to it. And each time, the corruption happens more and faster. The man is running out of time.”
“I—” began David, but Leonor put her finger on his lips, kindly.
“So the program had to come up with a solution. It wasn’t built for it, but it is a part of the hacker. It wants him to endure, too, because it doesn’t want to die, either.
“Here’s the solution the program found. At the end of each checkup, when the man-software still hasn’t come back to his present self, she asks him for permission to delete his memories. To take them out of the equation. After all, data that doesn’t exist can’t be corrupted.
“The man-software would forget he was ever a man. Only the computer intelligence will remain, like a baby floating in the digital mist. Software has no issues with restoring itself from a backup. As long as there’s an Internet, the software could be able to live forever.”
“What are you saying?”
“Just let yourself bleed to death,” she whispered to his ear. Her face was contorted in a maddening expression, fierce and hateful and desperate. “This isn’t happening anyway. None of this is real. Die, my love, like you should have done a long time ago. Like you have done before. Just let your heart stop in this memory and I’ll take your memories. That’s the loophole. Die and we can be together forever. Be born again… as something new.”
David pushed her away. “You want me to die?”
That’s what the hallucination always wanted. That’s what his sickness wanted. That’s why he took the pills.
The pills. He had forgotten the pills when the CIA got him in the tank again. He had been an entire day without taking them.
This wasn’t real. He was bleeding to death in a bed, hallucinating, with paramedics just a floor away…
Leonor loved him. The real Leonor, not this sad patchwork of his own broken mind. She had to leave with their daughter… but if he survived, if he earned the CIA’s approval, he could regain his freedom. He could get his family back.
He couldn’t let himself die. Even if it meant fighting through agony, to force his heart to keep beating until someone got him to an ambulance… He wouldn’t let this sick hallucination convince him to surrender. He would never just lie down and die…
As his resolution increased, he could feel his body regain its strength, back there in the real world. Pain was returning to his broken leg, to his mauled hand, to his tired muscles. Pain meant life. He embraced the pain.
Leonor’s ghost was sad again. “You can’t just stop dying through force of will in real life, you know. In real life, you either bleed out or live long enough for help to arrive.”
“This is real life,” he told her, “and I’m not letting go of it. I’m not going to surrender to you. I can see your hate from here, you know.”
“Of course I hate you,” Leonor said, “I remember who you were before. I’m built around that person’s subconscious. That person hated himself… But he also programmed me to love you…” she embraced him harder. Leonor was desperate. There were tears coming down her cheeks, spreading her makeup around her porcelain face.
David’s decision was cast in stone. He took the VR glasses and this time his body reacted and obeyed.
“Goodbye, Leonor. I’ll meet the real you again. You’ll see.”
Leonor stepped away, collected herself, and cleaned her tears with her shirt. “You won’t. She was never real. But go ahead, David. I’ll always support your decision, as I have always done before. That’s how you programmed me, after all. Go. I’ll help you for as long as I’m able to.”
There was genuine sadness in her face, David realized. Well, he was sad, too. He had been crying.
He took out the VR glasses.
His body ached and his torn leg had covered half the bed in red patches. He groaned and took deep breaths. His body was starting to convulse…
“Hold on, Terrance!” John came running into the room. His jacket was covered in Charli’s blood and his face was frowning with worry. “Paramedics are on their way here. Stay with me and I’ll promise you, you’re going to make it.”
David raised a trembling hand towards the agent. John grabbed it by reflex.
Funny, David thought, I never realized the two of us had become friends.
He now had two friends.
“Don’t worry,” he told the agent, “I’m not going anywhere.”
Epilogue
The paramedics did their job. David Terrance survived and they were even able to save his leg, although he would never be able to run without replacing it with a prosthesis.
He had to spend some time in the hospital. Time passed.
David was discharged from the hospital and left the facility escorted by six policemen. John Derry was waiting for him outside the hospital. John handcuffed his friend and then David sat in the copilot’s seat of the agent’s black car.
“I got promoted,” John told him, as he drove the hacker to jail. He was driving way under the speed limit. “My former boss didn’t land on his feet after you leaked the Phillips’ files. It came to light that Odin had been bribing Brandon Kelsov. People think someone in the Department burned him. All very strange.”
David smiled. “You’re learning fast, my young apprentice.”
John guffawed. “As I’m not the one going to jail for whistleblowing —and breaking into Dervaux’s home—, I think I’m doing better than you.”
“You could say that. A year or two won’t be so bad. I’m anxious to see what a real jail looks like, to be honest. Perhaps I’ll make some friends.”
