by Ray Mazza
“That’s great, identity theft.”
“It would be unlikely, but we need to take the proper precautions and let everyone know. But you probably won’t have any problems.”
“I hope not,” Trevor said.
“Sorry, Mr. Leighton.”
Wonderful. So someone was sitting in a crack-den somewhere, with a stack of files, using Trevor’s statement as rolling paper and filling out credit card applications in his name. It was a thought that stuck with him the rest of the day.
On the bright side, maybe they’d inherit Trevor’s resisting arrest charges, too.
Chapter 20
Hidden In Between
Trevor had just gotten in bed and turned off the lights when his phone rang. He started, still edgy from his encounter the night before.
It was Damon.
“Trevor, I wanted to let you know that you’ve been doing a great job with Allison. She’s thrilled to have your company.”
“I’ve never been much of a baby sitter before,” Trevor said, relieved, “But I’m honored to be able to watch Allison. She’s so intriguing and well-behaved.”
“I think getting her out of the lab was the best thing that could have happened to her... she was neglected and it was destroying her, but she’s shown an incredibly strong will,” Damon said, “Thank you, Trevor, for helping.”
“You’re welcome.” He meant it, while a small guilt-aware slice of his brain yelled at him for having crashed her. “What I don’t understand is why anyone would neglect her in the first place.”
“She was the first successful human simulation, Trevor. That means she’s running on an old machine. A slow machine, many years old – which, with our technology cycles, is generations behind our current tech. Subsequent simulations running on newer, faster systems have so much more potential. The older simulations are perceived as a phenomenal waste of time and money just to upkeep.”
“So they use older simulations for torturous experiments?”
“Most of the older ones get scrapped for resources, so I can at least be thankful they didn’t dismantle Allison. They needed someone for these ‘experiments,’ and they chose her. Also, you have to understand – I don’t make the decisions for Project Eileithyia anymore, so I don’t fully comprehend them… although I have suspicions this was partially done to... to alienate me,” Damon said.
“If you have simulations with much greater potential than Allison... what are they like?”
There was silence from Damon’s end of the line, as if he’d put the phone down. Finally he said, “Do you have a few hours?”
It was past midnight, but what could he say except, “Sure.”
“Great,” Damon said. “Get a taxi to Day Eight and have it drop you off around the corner by the loading dock. Meet me there in an hour and twenty minutes.”
Trevor was about to hang up when Damon said, “One more thing.”
“Yeah?”
“How much do you weigh?”
“One hundred seventy-two pounds, give or take.”
“Give or take how much?”
“I don’t know... three pounds, why?”
“You’re sure that’s accurate?”
“Yeah,” Trevor said, “pretty sure, why?”
“Good. You’ll find out.”
~
Being in a cab late at night on New York City streets when there was no traffic was similar to being in a speed boat race. The cab floated and bounced down the street on its under-damped shocks. The dark of night made fifty-five miles per hour feel like eighty-five. The cabbie sang along with a tape, snapping his fingers. He managed to grab the steering wheel with both hands just long enough to drift around turns before returning to his song.
Trevor looked around for his seatbelt for the third time, figuring it couldn’t hurt to check once more. All he found were a few pennies and a small, crumpled bag of sunflower seeds jammed in the crevice of the seat. It was more luck than he usually had.
When they arrived, he tipped the driver over thirty percent, glad to be on solid land again.
Another cab dropped Damon off a few minutes later. Trevor must have had an odd look on his face, because Damon explained, “Didn’t want to wake my chauffeur. Also didn’t want my car hanging around here right now.”
They went up the steps to a small door next to the cargo bay and Damon opened it with a key from his keychain.
“We trying not to be seen?” Trevor whispered.
“If we can help it,” Damon said, “because even I’m not allowed to be bringing you where we’re going.” He pulled a badge out of his pocket and handed it to Trevor. “Tonight, this is you.”
The badge read:
Matt Coniston
Electrical Engineering
Cosmology
Trevor clipped it to his shirt, thinking that he almost might be able to pass for the man in the picture.
“So what happens when people notice I’m not actually Matt Coniston?”
Damon shook his head. “Who? Nobody’s here. It’s for the security systems.” He took out a pen and handed it to Trevor. “Write the following number on the palm of your right hand: 1-5-9-0-8-2-3-4-3.”
Trevor did as he said, but had a hard time keeping the numbers from smudging; he wasn’t used to writing with his left hand.
“When you are asked to enter a code,” said Damon, “that’s what you punch in. I implanted this one into the system. It will only work until 8:00 am – it changes daily per-person – but we won’t be here that long.”
Trevor nodded.
The loading area was pristine on the inside, a large room with walls painted white and a swept floor. They walked to a service elevator in the back with an oversized door for moving large pallets of equipment. The elevator itself was spacious, and could probably fit close to thirty people between its plated walls.
At the fifteenth floor, they got out to call a normal elevator. Damon held the up button in for a long time, like a little boy. Of the three elevators, the one all the way on the left showed up, and they stepped in.
Damon swiped his badge through the reader, allowing them access to the highest floors. He pressed 28. Then he pressed the 1 button, presumably so it would return to the ground floor for some reason.
But he kept holding it.
Their elevator continued to ascend, and slowed down as it approached, but then passed, floor twenty-eight. After it felt like they had gone another full floor, the doors retracted silently – the elevator did not ding and the light for the 29th floor did not illuminate. Damon let go of the 1 button.
The location plate on the elevator frame just outside the doors read 28-1. They weren’t on the 29th floor.
They were on some floor between the 28th and the 29th level. Trevor looked over at Damon. Damon gestured for Trevor to step out of the elevator and told him, “There are two unmarked floors in this building. This is one of them, the other is immediately above. Only about twenty-five people in my core team know about them or have access to them.”
Trevor wondered what people thought when they walked down the stairwell and had to descend three flights to get from floor twenty-nine to twenty-eight. Maybe they brushed it off as mid-building waterworks or storage. Or maybe they didn’t even notice.
They stepped out into a bright white corridor that appeared to run around the perimeter of the building, making an acute turn at either end. The inner wall had some sheen to it, like it was one giant whiteboard. There were seams every ten feet or so, but no windows or doors anywhere on either side of the hall, except for where they just came from.
After two turns and walking another half-length of a hallway they were on the exact opposite side of the building, and they came to an inlet with a thick metal door.
“Okay,” Damon said, “One at a time. I’ll go through, and the handle will be pointed down. When it pops back, it’s your turn. You’ll have to swipe your badge and enter the number I gave you.”
Trevor looked at hi
s palm, making sure the numbers were still legible.
Damon dug in his pocket for something, then pulled out a small, solid case that looked like a cigarette tin. He opened it and delicately handed Trevor a surgical glove from inside. “Carefully put this on your left hand, and don’t touch anything with it until after you’ve used the biometric pad.”
Damon opened the door and stepped into a capsule-like cavity with another door. He stepped in and the floor lit up with a warm blue glow. The door sealed behind him.
Trevor glanced down the vacuous hallway. This kind of arrangement must violate about twelve fire codes, he thought, imagining a crowd of frantic scientists in lab coats surging down a long smoke-filled hallway, the only way out, clawing over each other and knocking each other’s glasses off.
After a minute, there was a hiss and the door handle snapped back ninety degrees. He stepped inside. The aqua glow of the floor was calming, like he was standing over a tank filled with Caribbean sea water.
The door in front of him had a small window with reinforced glass; he could see Damon on the other side standing a few feet away next to a monitor embedded in the wall. Damon was watching him, waiting for him to come through.
Trevor swiped his card through the reader. It beeped, and a keypad lit up next to it, prompting him to place his left hand on a dark, shiny pad next to the reader and enter his – or Matt Coniston’s, rather – code. He punched it in, then asterisks scrolled across the screen, trailing with the text:
Verifying Biometrics and Body Mass…
He felt a fleeting coolness on his left palm before the pad flashed green.
Biometrics Accepted.
Trevor removed his hand, then felt the floor give a little, accompanied by a dull hum. His weight appeared on the readout, flashing first 180 then 174, then bounced back and forth between 176 and 178. His heart jumped. He’d told Damon he weighed 173 pounds. He was way off. He wasn’t going to make it. He tried to remember the last time he’d actually weighed himself, but could only come up with when he’d been to the gym nearly two years ago, and that scale probably hadn’t even been accurate. Or he’d gained weight, which was entirely possible since he’d stopped working out. The readout settled on 177.
He stuck his hands against the walls and pressed hard, trying to take some of the weight off his feet. The walls felt like they were covered with a soft layer of rubber – not at all like the metal they appeared to be. Trevor felt an odd sensation in his palms. He understood what it meant, but only too late. A violent shock coursed from one side of his body to the other. It didn’t last long enough or have sufficient current to seriously hurt him, but it certainly got the point across. He couldn’t cheat the system. The readout stayed on 177 pounds.
The gentle blue glow of the floor flashed and became a violet-red. He flinched. There was a loud buzz and the readout flashed:
*YOU ARE BEING DETAINED*
Trevor stepped over to the window to signal Damon, but Damon already seemed to know what was going on. He frantically smacked keys on a keyboard that had slid out from the wall under the monitor.
Both doors were locked. Trevor looked around, telling himself that he was smart, that he should be able to figure something out, even without Hillary’s reassuring voice guiding him. When he noticed the security camera in the upper-left hand corner of the room, he felt anything but smart.
He looked back out the window. Damon had given up at the keyboard.
Then… everything stopped. The floor went back to its cool, aqua hue. The readout blinked clear, then a new message displayed:
173 pounds plus 5 pounds equipment.
The door in front of him whined, its internal hydraulic teeth retracting from the wall, then it popped open an inch as trapped air escaped into the next room. Trevor pushed his way through with an unsteady hand and closed the door behind him.
Damon stared at him for a moment before saying, “I thought you looked a bit chunky... bashful about your weight? I was able to specify your entry as a cargo drop.”
“Ha ha. If there are any more potential surprises, could you let me know in advance?”
“I think we’ll be fine,” Damon said, “although in the future, I’m not sure that I will be. That’s one of the reasons I want you to see all this,” he said, turning around.
“What’s that mean?”
“Let’s go,” said Damon, choosing not to elaborate.
Trevor shrugged, then followed.
As they walked, Damon said, “Hopefully this will answer more questions for you than it creates. Brace yourself for a mental shift.”
Chapter 21
Simulation 4049
The room they entered was mostly normal, adorned with couches, coffee tables, and magazine clutter. Some kind of sitting room. But it was the walls that drew Trevor’s attention. One wore an array of shiny plaques as if it were sporting gigantic plate mail. Another two walls were entirely filled with small, horizontal strips of metal the size of bookmarks, each with miniscule engravings.
Trevor stepped over to one of the large plaques near the start of the wall and studied it. It said:
Jamison: Simulation 81
US Patent # 5,497,403
Granted April 23, 2005
For feedback clamping circuit design utilizing digital information and noise detection with gain control in feedback loops.
As he walked further along the wall, he saw that they were all commemorating patents the company held. The plaques were nearly identical to ones they had on the normal floors of the building, except for two things. First, there must be hundreds here. He’d only seen maybe thirty or forty around the building on the main floors. He wasn’t aware the company held so many patents. And second…
“These are all patents for things invented by human simulations?” Trevor asked.
“That’s correct,” said Damon. “A fair amount of today’s higher technology is made with a process or contains a component that one of our simulated humans invented.”
“Seriously? Such as?”
“Have you ever used a cell phone?”
“Of course.”
“Some of our technology is now in every cell phone. One of our simulants pioneered second-gen cell phones – the digital PCS phones – by optimizing usage of the 1900 megahertz radio band they utilize.”
Trevor shook his head. “Why have I never heard of this? I’ve never heard that Day Eight had anything to do with cell phones.”
“Of course you haven’t. That would be disastrous,” said Damon. “We have a very specific process for handling technological progress. For example, several companies are heavily pursuing better flat-screen displays, or even flexible or transparent displays by using OLEDs – organic light emitting diodes. A simulation named Peter developed the idea for OLEDs years ago.
“Now, a Femptodyne researcher named Jiao Sheng is publicly credited for the invention of OLEDs. Our simulations are developing so many technologies that it is sometimes in our best interest not to take credit for them. Many developments are not in our official area of expertise, and would draw suspicious attention. Can you imagine the public’s reaction if they were to find out we had humans living inside computers?”
“You’re right…” mused Trevor, “the world has enough trouble accepting stem cell research and cloning.”
“You bet,” Damon continued, moving along the wall, “Other developments aren’t important enough for us to spend our time and money to bring to physical form. Instead of patenting the intellectual property in question – which would be prohibitive to industry growth – we give it to any number of scientists we have working in a spectrum of companies. Of course, we only hold patents for the IP we don’t leak to other companies.”
Trevor nearly tripped over his own feet. “So you’re saying that this Jiao Sheng guy is a plant for Day Eight that we’ve put inside of Femptodyne?”
Damon nodded. “And so are scientists at forty-seven other companies.” He stared off into the distance
and added, “The ones that I know of, at least. It’s expanded beyond my awareness.”
“There’s no way you’d put plants in other companies just to give them information. What else do you get out of it?”
“We pay them a hefty salary for ‘consulting’ and they, in the past, have given us a plethora of starting points for technologies that we have had our human simulations work from.”
“So you’re stealing the intellectual property of other companies to feed into the simulations,” said Trevor.
“I wouldn’t put it that way. If anything, we give back more than we take. In the end, it’s a symbiotic relationship.”
Trevor sensed an odd inflection in Damon’s voice. “But...?”
“But that was years ago,” said Damon, “the output of our human simulations eventually surpassed anything we were getting from our plants. So now we feed them information, and only when we deem it mutually advantageous.”
Damon walked to the next wall, one of the ones decorated with much smaller strips of metal. “Which brings me to these,” he said, tapping one with his forefinger.
Trevor inspected one of the slender plates. The information on them was similar to the plaques. The one he eyed read:
Sofia: Simulation 623
Pending Patent Filed: February 2, 2006
For optoelectronic stimulation of coherent wave emission from nanocircuit gluons.
“As you can see,” Damon said, “here we have thousands of cataloged – and potentially patentable – discoveries. After two walls, we stopped mounting them.”
Trevor walked along the wall. The first of the unpatented plates was dated December 21, 2006. The next was dated January 28, 2007. He counted only eighteen from the year 2007. There were many more from the year 2008, perhaps about fifty or sixty. It looked like there were nearly ten times as many from 2009, and he was only a quarter of the way down the first wall when he reached the year 2010. The rest of the wall and the entire second wall were all from 2010. The final mounted plate read:
