Face Smuggler

by Matthew Sills

  Flurries of micrometeors pinged off the hull at irregular intervals like sporadic rain showers. Grayson hovered just above the pilot’s chair. The loosely worn seatbelt kept him from floating away. The dormant ship’s console blinked somnorifically: its own systems already in hibernation as the ship drifted among the meteor cluster. Alice had been quiet that day, and Grayson fell into his thoughts within the tungsten-alloy cocoon of the cockpit.

  He had not slept much. The perdurance of questions surrounding Alice plagued him, and his failure to make definitive progress vexed him. Each theory came with enough holes in it to require theories of its own. He slammed his fist on the armrest, which sent him bouncing against his seatbelt. It was impossible to form a plan without certainty on even the most basic details of the situation. He learned in medical school that even a small error at the outset could lead to disastrous consequences in the end. The basic facts of a diagnosis needed to be established before beginning treatment. For example, he wasn’t even sure Alice was an AI anymore. She did not display any of the characteristic tics or an AI or thought loops of a simulacrum - especially when running for as long as Alice had been since he officially met her.

  That line of thinking led to two possibilities, and between them Grayson wasn’t sure which he liked less: either his original theory remained correct, in which case Alice was perhaps the most advanced AI in the solar system. Grayson didn’t want to think about the implications for all those that would be pursuing them in that case. Of course, that didn’t explain her time confusion, unless the was the most advanced AI in the solar system that also happened to be created twenty years ago and given the persona and memories of the youngest child in the Liddell family. It made Grayson’s head hurt.

  The other possibility was that she wasn’t an AI, which meant she was something… else. Grayson didn’t know what that something could possibly be. There was also the possibility that she was in fact who she said she was. That would be in spite of the evidence that Alice Liddell was alive and well. It would also mean someone had managed to transcribe a full personality onto an electronic medium - something Grayson knew was impossible. He rejected that possibility more vociferously than the others for the personal reasons attached to it.

  Grayson unhooked his seatbelt and somersaulted over the chair. He grasped the handholds on the bulkhead and propelled himself through the hatch into the main corridor. The portion of the ship designed for crew habitation was crammed into the upper third of the hull. His momentum carried him to the resistance room. It had been too long since he combatted the physiological effects of their hiding. He felt himself growing weaker and was aware of a dangerous apathy growing about that fact; besides, sometimes exercise helped him think.

  The resistance room housed a pair of multi joined arachnoid-looking contraptions designed to move with the major joints on the human body and apply earth-nominal resistance. Once hooked up, the effect resembled wearing a mechanical exoskeleton. Grayson went through the tedious process of hooking himself in and then began moving as though running. Sweat beaded on his body and floated away into the air. A low but steady current of air blowing through the room gathered the sweat into collectors on the opposite wall and funneled it into the ship’s water reclamation system. Grayson exerted himself and let his thoughts run about what to do next, but he ultimately had to admit that he and Alice had hit a wall.

  His tablet was beeping when Grayson returned to his station at the cockpit. The program cracked the code to Alice’s encrypted engrams., and they were ready to be unlocked. Perhaps some of the answers eluding Grayson were waiting there.

  “Alice?” There was no response. Grayson tried again louder, “Alice.”

  “Hmm?”

  “What were you doing?”

  “Oh, I was sleeping.”

  “You sleep?”

  “Sort of. What’s going on?”

  “The engrams are ready to be decrypted. Are you ready?”

  “Yes. Do it.”

  Grayson ran the algorithm. “You should be able to access them now.”

  Alice gasped.

  “What do you see?” He asked.

  ““I-I think I know what happened to me. It’s coming back in bits and pieces. I was sick,” she said. “They wanted to save me in case I didn’t make it.”

  “I don’t understand,” Grayson said.

  “I was in the hospital. Do you remember when I told you my last memory was going to the regatta with my father? That day I thought I was coming down with a cold, but I got really sick. It hurt to breathe so bad that my chest hurt even when I wasn’t doing anything. I don’t remember exactly what was wrong, but the infection aggravated a heart defect I must have had since birth. ‘Myocarditis’ - I remember that.

  “I guess it was a flukey sort of thing. I’d been living with a structural defect in one of the ventricles, but it was something that would never cause a problem for most people. The doctors never saw an infection cause complications quite like it before. Although the infection eventually cleared up, the damage to my heart was already done. They were afraid that the ventricle would rupture because of what happened with the defect.”

  “So what happened?” Grayson asked.

  “I had to have heart surgery,” she replied, “to repair the ventricular wall as soon as possible. The best option would have been a transplant, but no one had any way of predicting how long the damaged ventricle would last.” Alice’s recollection elicited a dark laugh, “Strict bed rest, nothing that could get me excited - all that. So it had to be surgery; even growing a replacement from my own cells would take longer than the doctors were comfortable with.”

  “It must have been bad.”

  “It was,” Alice said softly. “The surgery carried a lot of risks, but it hurt, Grayson. With every breath it hurt. I could tell I didn’t have much time.”

  “Was that in 182?” Grayson asked.

  “Yeah,” Alice answered.

  Grayson clicked his tongue. “Today you can get an artificial heart good for 10-20 years. Back then the science hadn’t figured out how to get the synchronization with the autonomic nervous system.” He recalled studying it at the time.

  “C’est la vie,” said Alice.

  “What did you do?”

  “Oh, we decided to operate. I talked it over with my family and the doctors. It was the best option despite the risks, and the risks were very, very high.”

  “What were the odds?”

  “About one in three.”

  “For something to go wrong? That’s terrible! How did you find a surgeon willing to operate with those odds?”

  “A lot of money and a lot of waivers,” Alice said. “If it meant a chance to get better then I wanted to try, and so did my parents.”

  “So what happened with the surgery?”

  “I don’t know. My memory doesn’t go that far, but I remember what happened right before the operation.”

  “Was that when… you were transferred?”

  “Yeah. My parents came to see me. They were brilliant engineers, and as you know, founding members of Axios. At that time, a lot of resources were being invested into cybernetics by the corporation trying to jump the curve on the competition.”

  “I remember,” said Grayson. “The thought was that full cyberization for humans would become possible before long - before the Anthropos laws were adopted.”

  “But they did it,” Alice said excitedly. “Axios managed to do it. They achieved a cybernetic brain capable of housing the human consciousness fully. That’s what this CPU is, Grayson. That’s what I am…”

  Grayson swallowed hard against the lump rising in his throat.

  “… when my parents came to visit before the surgery they were so scared. I was too, but they said there might be a way to guarantee I could keep living even if something went wrong in the surgery.”

  “They copied your memories onto a cyberbrain.”

  “Memories, personality, everything. It was an insurance p
olicy. The plan was to wipe the files if the surgery succeeded, but if it failed, then ‘I’ could pick up living where I left off before the sickness. The last memories were locked so I wouldn’t know I was a copy of the real Alice. There was something about the procedure that required an all-or-nothing transfer up to that point. I guess they couldn’t just leave ones out selectively -

  “My God, what does that even mean,” she interrupted herself abruptly, “the ‘real’ Alice? What does that make me - am I even a real person?”

  “Sarah,” Grayson whispered.

  “Who is Sarah?”

  “I need to get out of here.” Grayson propelled himself down the corridor.

  “Grayson, where are you going?” Alice’s voice followed him on the ship’s intercom.

  He didn’t know. It wasn’t like he could go very far, but he needed some proverbial fresh air; the cockpit had become suddenly claustrophobic. They managed to do with Alice what he failed to do for Sarah all those years ago.

  “Sarah was my fiancé,” Grayson answered. “And I don’t know what it means for you.”

  Alice humphed at him. “At least now you believe I’m not an AI.”

  Grayson wasn’t sure what he believed she was. If he had succeeded, Sarah would have turned out the same way. Would he have wanted that for her? Would she have wanted that?

  “You never said you had a fiancé. Why mention her now? Where is she?”

  The question hung in the air. “She’s dead,” he said at last. “I killed her. At least, it’s my fault that she died,” he amended. “It’s the same difference, really.”

  “What happened?” Alice asked.

  “I told you was in school to be a doctor?”

  “Yes, I remember.”

  “So was Sarah. We were in school together, only she was specializing in immuno-oncology. So the irony when she came down with cancer… it was already widely metastasized by the time symptoms appeared and she was diagnosed, so there wasn’t a lot of hope the treatments would be effective. She tried anyways. She was a fighter.

  “At the time I had been working on reading and storing memory engrams. The ultimate goal of the research was to be able to repair and replace damaged part of the brain - whether from traumatic injury or degenerative disease. The potential treatments were exciting.

  “When it became obvious that Sarah only had a few more months to live, I came up with a plan. I thought, using the research I had been working on, I could store her memories and personality so that if she died, maybe when technology advanced, she could go on living in a cybernetic body. Those kind of breakthroughs seemed around the corner back then.

  “I knew the theory for how to transfer the memories, and I had done it on the small scale in the lab. She wanted to try it, but in the end it didn’t work. It was about the same time as your illness.” Grayson trailed off.

  “What went wrong?” Alice nudged.

  “There was some sort of feedback loop. It shorted out the storage medium and fried Sarah’s brain in the process. She died… I stole those last months from her and from everyone who knew her.”

  “Grayson, I’m sorry…”

  “Of course, there were consequences afterwards. I avoided jail time, barely. It was very nearly a manslaughter charge. I was kicked out of medical school for malpractice and barred from ever seeking a license. A friend and classmate, Benedict, helped. He was kicked out and barred from ever practicing as well.

  “After that, it just didn’t seem like much mattered anymore. I did some drifting and eventually found myself out in the rim plying my skills to craft new identities for people. You’d be surprised how many people out there are running away from something in their past.”

  “Like us?” Alice asked.

  Grayson laughed. “Yes, I suppose. But the procedure succeeded with you. I’ll be damned. I don’t know what to even think about that.”

  If he had succeeded, would Sarah have wound up how Alice did? He had asked this question before, but it had only been a vague wondering. Never before had he been presented with a clear picture of the potential outcome.

  Over the years, he had been haunted by his feeling of responsibility for her death and guilt at depriving her of the little time she had left - stealing it from those others around her who cared for her. However, there had also been the macabre question mark over the nature of what he had tried to do. More than once his mind suggested an answer: he just wanted to create a duplicate, in case - but a duplicate of what: If memories and personality traits, was that not all that constituted Alice? Would he have wanted that for her? Would she have wanted that?

  The intimated but unasked questions had insinuated their subtle accusations to his conscience, but he had been able to ignore them on account of the vagaries of their subject matter. Now that he had Alice before him, it was difficult not to feel like a monster - a failed one, but no different from modern day Doctor Frankenstein in intention. What was it the man called Alice? An abomination. It was easy to see things that way when dealing with the simulacrum of a loved one. However, there was still the question of what to do about Alice. He had fallen silent, and she was still waiting on him.

  “Grayson?”

  For a moment, he heard her voice. And then he decided: He would never know the alternative outcomes with Sarah, but if she did turn out like Alice did, then he knew for sure how he’d want her to be treated. Alice was real, and he knew what he would do from here on out. He would do everything he could to help her, and perhaps that would begin to make amends to the ghosts that perdured no matter where in the solar system he found himself.

  “At least one thing is clear,” he said at last.

  “What’s that?”

  “Going back to Earth or making contact with Axios is strictly out of the question. You said the original plan was to destroy the cyberbrain if the operation was a success?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well the original Alice survived, and she is alive and well. For whatever reason you weren’t destroyed. I don’t intend on turning you over just so it can happen now. Besides, there’s the question of my own skin in this whole thing as well.” Abomination - that’s what they had called her. That made sense now. What else would you call a cybernetic copy of yourself, sharing your memories and personality? Grayson did not see her that way, however.

  “You think those were Axios agents after us, don’t you?”

  “I’m sure of it now. Do you think differently?”

  “No. I think you’re right. What do we do?”

  “I’m not sure yet, but at least we have ruled out two things we can’t do. Sometimes eliminating the wrong options is the best way to find the right one.”

  With the old questions answered, the problems facing them clearly emerged at last. The most immediate problem was how to throw Axios off their trail for good. The crux of the issue consisted not in being unable to escape, but rather where to go. The solar system was a big place with ample room to run, but eventually one had to land somewhere.

  Grayson feared that anytime Alice surfaced she would be flagged. Any reference to Alice Liddell other than the one currently living in Taiwan was sure to bring unwelcome scrutiny from Axios. He had to acknowledge the fact that he was marked by Axios as well. Fortunately, this was a problem Grayson knew how to deal with; after all, he dealt in identities. The second, and far more difficult problem, was putting Alice back in a body. Grayson did not have a ready solution for that. However, nothing else would matter much if Axios caught them. Thus, Grayson focused on how to best solve the first problem and trusted that a solution to the second would appear in time.

  He thought they had a fighting chance if only they could make it to the rim. There, they might both find a fresh start. Grayson had seen it time and again in others: People who, for whatever reason, decided the need for a fresh start was so great that they left everything behind and traveled millions of miles for the change to start again. The solar system was a large place, but the data systems tha
t connected it all ensured your identity followed you to any civilized colony you landed on. With altered biometrics, a new name, and paperwork to match, that fresh start was attainable.

  Alice’s particular situation was more complicated, but there were those on the rim fleeing from problems as serious as Axios situation - or worse. He wasn’t fully sure that the vast expanses of the rim would deliver from the corporation’s long arm, but he knew for a fact that even wanted fugitives had successfully escaped their fate amidst the habitats of the Kuiper Belt and beyond. No one cared to catalogue the secrets harbored among the great rotating drums set among the primordial remains of the solar system’s formation, and that was how the people living there preferred it.

  Grayson hoped Alice and he would not be relegated to such an existence, but it was clear that a new look and name wouldn’t cut it for them. For ordinary people the millions of miles provided a sufficient barrier between their old lives and new such that their forged identities never underwent serious scrutiny. Alice and he were more akin to fugitives from the law who, even at the edge of inhabited space, nevertheless had to lay low. Some more drastic means were required to pry themselves free from the searching grasp of Axios. Then, perhaps some of the tricks of his trade would be of use. Of all the ironies foisted upon him in his life, he never thought he would count himself among the clients for whom he smuggled faces.

  A new realization settled in on Grayson. He needed a fresh start, not just because of the present situation, but for reasons like so many of his previous clients. Perhaps that self-recognition in them and their stories accounted for the strange mixture of pity and condescension he always felt towards them.

  He never fully accepted what happened to Sarah, and he never got over blaming himself. In a way, every person he helped to find their fresh start reflected himself. But now the truth was naked before him: the Axios agents weren’t the only things he had been running from up to this point.