by Ian Hocking
Her father seemed to deflate. ‘Jenny, Bruce Shimoda is the man I killed.’
‘I know.’
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Their footsteps echoed on the iron stairs. Jennifer led, followed by her father, then Saskia. The top of the column was edged by an artificial parapet of rock. They stopped at a chain-link fence with an inset door. Next to its handle was a slot. Jennifer swiped her card and they passed through. Met Four comprised two prefabricated buildings. An array of antennas and dishes sat on top of the first. Above the second, there were two flags: the Stars and Stripes and the pennant of the US meteorological office.
A man emerged from the first building. He was unarmed, but Jennifer knew that his colleague stood by in the second building with a sub machine-gun.
‘Morning, ma’am,’ he said. If he had said, ‘Morning, miss,’ this would have been a coded instruction to go home.
‘Morning.’
‘Guests?’
‘That’s right.’
They entered the first building. Inside, it was unremarkable. A ranger sat behind a desk, his hands at keyboard. Nearby, a secretary placed some papers in a filing cabinet. Jennifer had walked into the same room once a day for more than a year. The woman and the man had never changed their positions.
‘Good morning, Jim.’
‘Morning, Jennifer. Who are your friends?’
‘Professors Stiefel and Whitney from Caltech. They should be expected.’
Jim checked his computer. ‘They are. Have a great day.’
‘Thanks.’
Jennifer led them through a chipboard partition to a cloakroom. She placed her coat on a hanger and did a twirl for the microwave camera. Saskia and her father did the same. Jennifer showed them where to put their thumbs against the wood. Their nail beds glowed pink. Partial sections of her DNA were read and checked. Thanks to the work of Ego behind the scenes, they matched those held by Met Four Base. The floor sank. When their heads had passed below the floor, a panel closed the top of the shaft. A gap appeared at their feet as the lift slid into a room.
‘Where are we heading?’ asked her father.
Jennifer studied her father in the growing brightness. When she had argued for improved computing support at a committee meeting the day before, she had ridden her anger hard, as always, and she knew its source. She had not shouted at the chairman but at her father. At her father, who had dumped her in a school in New York and left for England. But now, in his presence, her fury had died to an ember. He had given her the best education. For him, that was the first priority. It was his one true aspiration. He had put that aspiration above their relationship. He was a principled man.
‘Through the looking glass, Alice.’
They spoke little for the rest of the way. They descended further into the rock and took their first steps into the research centre proper. Jennifer explained that the low-ceilinged, busy corridors comprised the Stack, which was the vertical structure that threaded the enormous, tunnelled spiral of Met Four Base. The Stack housed administrative offices, workshops, recreational facilities, a canteen, and a water processing system connected to Lake Mead. Five minutes later, they took a horizontal corridor leading away from the Stack. Jennifer gestured to the door at its end. Its sign read, ‘Project N25136 (Looking Glass)’.
~
Jennifer opened her eyes. She was in orbit around the virtual planet. Clouds wheeled across oceans that glistened in the light of the local star. The vapour met her as she passed through. Beneath were mountains, forests, and the trails of great rivers. Further she fell. She turned to her right and saw the sun set behind the planet’s belly. Two evening stars fell with her: Saskia and her father. They stopped in water at the base of a ravine that ran north-south into the foothills of a mountain. It was widest at her point of landfall. To her right was an expanse of shingle, which reached out for a kilometre before meeting the wall of the ravine. At its face was a hut. It was crude but solid. From this distance, nothing could be seen but for the bonfire set before its porch. It produced a weak, shifting light.
She closed her eyes and imagined the bonfire. She was transported in an instant. Saskia and her father settled nearby. The fire sounded like rain on glass.
‘Computer, run program “knock knock”.’
The bonfire erupted to twice its height. Then it settled back to a murmur.
Jennifer watched as a man stepped from the hut. He held a spear. He was wrapped from head to foot in fir fronds.
‘Welcome to my parlour.’
‘Oh my God,’ her father whispered. ‘How?’
Bruce Shimoda approached the bonfire and sat. ‘I arrived two days ago, David. Moments before you destroyed the Onogoro computer, a stream of information representing me was uploaded to a server, then downloaded to Project Looking Glass, here in Nevada.’
Her father’s voice was incredulous. ‘You’re a back-up?’
‘I don’t have time to answer your questions, David. Not right now. I need to talk to Saskia.’
‘Me?’ she said.
‘Listen.’
Bruce looked into the flames and sighed.
~
There was once a planet called Onogoro. It was home to many creatures. Some ran, some flew, and some swam. Many of them were copied from another place called Real World.
One day, visitors arrived from Real World. They wore long white coats and did not appreciate the beauty of Onogoro. They only appreciated ‘Cash’. They were Gods. They could change the way a creature grew, where it grew and if it grew at all. They could raise oceans, sink mountains and know the mind of any creature but Themselves.
Thousands of years passed in silence but for the ticking of a great clock that no inhabitant of Onogoro could hear.
Then, one day, the Visitors returned. They brought with them a girl. She was not really a girl, of course. Nothing in Onogoro was real in the same way as the things in Real World. This girl was a long, long series of zeroes and ones. She was just information about how to build a girl.
She ran and played and fell down and bled, but she was not real because only things in Real World were real.
The Visitors observed her and ticked boxes on Their questionnaires. They returned to Real World and reported. Their Leaders nodded in a solemn fashion and handed over more Cash.
The Visitors came back and continued their observations of the girl. They observed as she ran away from predators and searched the planet for company, but They did not help her because she was not real. They watched as she grew into a woman. They watched as she slipped into a stream and drowned.
When the Visitors returned again to their Leaders, the Leaders nodded in a solemn fashion. ‘You must test some more,’ they said. More Cash was produced.
And so it went on.
A hundred years passed. The number of humans—though they were not truly human, they were just long, long strings of zeroes and ones—increased. They developed a language, and clothing, and built huts, and cooked their food. Some died of a mysterious sickness carried by the air; some were eaten. The Visitors observed. They ticked boxes on questionnaires.
Children were born at a steady rate. But these children were not identical to those in Real World. They were born with two heads, or extra-long tongues, or fluorescent fingernails. Some would never learn to talk. Some were born insane and grew into monsters and were banished.
Still the Visitors ticked the boxes on Their questionnaires. But They were less happy with Their job. It was not because of the Cash. The Cash was good. The Visitors were becoming squeamish. They had seen so much suffering that They began to regard the Onogoro people as Real. It was difficult because They knew that the Onogoroers could never be Real. To be Real, you must be born in Real World. After all, that is what Real means.
But Their doubts remained. They told Their Leaders. Their Leaders nodded solemnly, produced more Cash, and told stories of glory in genetic research: a cure to aging, brain disease and anything wrong with Real people. The Onogoro people
would give them the information they needed.
And then, one day, a certain boy was born in Onogoro. He was perfect but in all but one respect. He had no eyes. Now, one of the Visitors, Bruce, was also blind. You might not guess that because this person was very cavalier and helped by His great friend, David. In fact, He had never seen Onogoro. It had only been described to Him. When Bruce learned of the child who had been born without eyes, He returned to Real World and shouted at His Leaders.
They did not nod solemnly. Instead, They told Him He was suffering from stress. They told Him that Onogoro people were not real. How could they be Real, when they were just zeroes and ones? They could not be Real because only people in Real World are Real. After all, that is what Real means.
Bruce talked to His friend, David, until They were both in agreement. They decided that the Onogoroers had been treated unfairly. Bruce and David knew that They should stop interfering with their zeroes and ones, but even if They never came back, other visitors (with their taste for Cash) would continue Their work.
They decided to delete Onogoro.
Their plan was complex and took weeks to prepare. Finally, the day came. The hours ticked by. Three hours before They were due to carry out their plan, a terrible explosion blew through Real World. Onogoro was damaged but it was not deleted. It slept.
When the fires were doused and a new morning came, David and Bruce were summoned to Their Leaders. The Cash stopped. The Leaders wanted to jail Them both.
But David and Bruce were innocent. They went free.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
‘And what,’ asked Saskia, ‘do you expect me to make of that?’
‘Same old same old.’ The digital man did not move his eyes from the bonfire. ‘I wish I could see your face.’
‘Allow me to describe it. I am scowling.’
‘Do you understand the lesson?’
‘Yes. You believe that an artificial life form is truly alive and subject to proper ethical considerations. That is untrue. You say this because you yourself are artificial.’
Bruce grabbed his spear and began to stab at the bonfire. ‘Well put,’ he said. ‘But tell me, how long have you had that chip in your brain?’
‘Guess.’
‘I don’t have to. Last week, you told me everything.’
Her smile hung. ‘Last week? Before I -’
‘Let’s start with your body. You are in your late twenties and physically fit. What about your mind? You remember a boyfriend called Simon, but the memory is false. I could tell you more about yourself, but I’ve already reached the extent of your own knowledge. Anything else, you wouldn’t recognise.’
‘Stop this,’ Saskia said. She fought to transform her unease into anger. ‘You have acquired this information from Jennifer, via her father.’
David said, ‘Saskia, you never told me about a boyfriend.’
‘In passing, perhaps I did,’ Saskia replied, but her voice had grown quiet.
‘Describe that chip to me,’ said Bruce.
‘I cannot describe—’
‘Tell me what it does,’ he said. He was still prodding the fire. Unreal embers drifted upwards.
‘It contains a new personality.’
‘How does it contain it?’
‘I…I don’t know,’ Saskia stammered.
‘Let’s think about your mind. Where did it come from? To capture the thoughts of a brain with enough detail to replicate it, the brain must be destroyed. We don’t know whether this brain—what you think of as ‘you’—might have submitted itself voluntarily to the process. It might have been tricked. But I think we must assume that the physical body that once contained what you consider to be ‘you’, Saskia, is dead. I think ‘dead’ is also a good word for the thoughts running on that chip. The code that represents your mind exists, inert, on an artificial substrate, forcing your muscles to move through direct nervous stimulation, just as frog legs will kick when supplied with an electric current.’
‘How do you know all this?’
‘As I said, it was explained to me last week by someone with intimate knowledge of the mechanism: you.’ Before she could interrupt, Bruce continued, ‘Imagine this body we see today, Saskia, lying in an operating theatre, perhaps under sedation, perhaps awake and screaming. A surgeon planted the chip between the cerebellum and the visual cortex. Over the next two or three days, while the body was immobilised, a network of filaments worked into its brain like an aggressive cancer. Each filament grew for a millimetre then divided in two; this happened once every hour, so that within six hours there were more than four hundred million million separate fibres. They formed a three-dimensional mesh. Then the next phase began: the fibres retrained the brain according to the ghost of the mind on the chip. It happened slowly, just as you might rebuild a house by swapping bricks; it takes a while, but avoids having to knock the house down.
‘Imagine your mind as a seesaw with opposing riders. Your chip is light but far from the fulcrum. Your brain is heavy but closer. That’s the way Beckmann likes it. The unconscious speaks through inspiration; through irrational certainty.’
By the pricking of my thumbs.
‘Did Beckmann alter my mind after it was first copied from the…original? I understand guns, violence. Languages.’
‘Those are probably additions. Maybe even fragments of other minds that had those skills. I don’t think it’s possible to fundamentally change the mind itself, in terms of a personality. The construct is too complex. You are the same person you were.’
‘But who am I?’
‘Your mind? We can only guess. As for your body—that is, your brain—it has its own language. You must learn to speak it.’
Saskia stared into the fire with eyes that were not her own and considered Bruce’s words. Beneath the rhetorical flourishes were truths she had already conceived. But the notion of a dividing line between this body and her mind was paradoxical. Was her mind like the flame, and the body like the wood? And yet she could appreciate an essential dichotomy between thinking and doing: her mind was uncontrollable within its own realm, but her body was assured and definite. Her body would move only when her will exceeded a threshold. What did that threshold represent? Was that the line between her mind and her body? Between her identity and her meat?
She closed her eyes.
She saw the hawk.
The hawk that returned.
Three old women on a dark plain. The Fates: Clotho, she spins the thread of life. Lachesis, she measures a length. Atropos, she cuts it. One of the women turned. Her skin was baggy and her eyes empty. ‘You will return,’ she said, ‘as you have returned before.’
Spin, measure, snip.
She saw Jago. Poor, dear Scotty. It was night. He was walking towards a small boat, which was tied to a pontoon. On the boat was a hooded man. Saskia called out and Scotty turned. He smiled and said something she couldn’t make out (Don’t worry about me, hen) and reached into his pocket. He withdrew something (a Zippo lighter) from his pocket and struck it on his thigh: the lid opened on the down stroke and the wick lit on the upstroke. She waved. His lips moved but she couldn’t hear (The gift of fire) his words. He spoke again from (Remember what you’re carrying) a far away place (…Ute).
‘So,’ said Bruce. ‘Your unconscious mind is a stranger, your conscious one a ghost. But it is a digital ghost. You are one of us. Welcome to the world of the un-’
Chapter Thirty
A concussive wave clapped her ears and a confetti of sharp fragments sparkled across her back. With a kiss of negative pressure, Saskia removed the mask and let it rise to its ceiling dock. She turned, crunching the fragments of the cubicle door, to see a distinguished, suited gentlemen holding a gun. A hair of smoke strayed from its barrel. The man was frowning at Saskia.
She was unhurt. She slipped forward and watched her body perform. Her wrist struck the man’s gun hand. She moved to his right, beyond the angle of the weapon should it discharge, gripped the gun barrel
securely, twisted, and stepped behind him. She pushed and he fell onto his belly, sliding over the tiles until he came to a rest at David’s feet.
‘Good, isn’t she?’ said David.
Saskia swung out the cylinder, counted five bullets, and snapped it shut. ‘You’re too old to be a guard,’ she said to the man. ‘Who are you?’
‘Saskia,’ David said, ‘allow me to introduce John Hartfield, owner of Met Four Base and the cure for cancer. Third richest man in the world.’
‘Second,’ Hartfield said. ‘Rottstein died on Mars last Tuesday. More money than air.’
Jennifer stepped from her cubicle and touched Saskia’s shoulder. ‘Are you OK?’
‘Yes. The bullet missed.’
Hartfield laughed but the sound was wrong. His eyes seemed dead. Saskia understood, right then, that he was insane. ‘I was wrong to send Klutikov. You’re too…lucky.’
‘Beckmann sent Klutikov, not you. What is your association with Beckmann?’
He laughed. Again, it sounded like a bad copy.
‘Answer me,’ she said, pointing the gun at his knee.
‘Why? You’ll shoot me anyway.’
‘Perhaps I won’t.’
‘Wait,’ David said. He fished his wallet from his jacket pocket. From that, he produced his personal computer. ‘Ego, switch to speaker mode. I want you to analyze our voice stress patterns for their veracity.’
‘Understood,’ replied a new, quiet voice.
Saskia said, ‘Hartfield will be unharmed if he answers truthfully. Correct?’
‘You are telling the truth,’ Ego replied.
Hartfield eased himself upright. At the flick of Saskia’s wrist, he moved more slowly. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I have no concealed weapons.’
‘Mr Hartfield, you are also telling the truth.’
‘Empty your pockets,’ Jennifer said, and Hartfield consented. He gave up a set of keys, a wallet, and a blue pass-card. Jennifer spread the pile. ‘No more weapons.’
‘Answer my question first,’ Saskia said. ‘What is your relationship to Beckmann?’
