Mad Skills

by Greatshell, Walter

  “That’s fine.”

  “All right, then. All you have to do is call this number every day at 5 a.m. to receive that day’s work assignment. Then you just show up and punch your time card.”

  “I got it. Can I ask you something?”

  “Certainly, shoot.”

  “I thought you won.”

  “Won … ?” The man was drawing a complete blank.

  “The election.”

  “Oh! The election, yes. Yes, I won my seat. Actually, it’s my second term.”

  “Term as what?”

  “Mayor. I’m the mayor of Harmony. Among other duties.”

  “Congratulations. So I guess you have me to thank for that.”

  “Oh? How so?”

  Maddy intended to reply, I murdered your opponent, jackass, but Strode’s look was so dumb and guileless that she said, “Nothing—never mind.”

  THIRTY-FOUR

  WORK

  SHE worked.

  There was not much to it. Every morning she called a number and was told where to show up. Usually it was the big parking lot behind the Visitor’s Center, where the different crews milled around in the dark and cold until a bus arrived to take them to their various work assignments.

  For the first couple of days, Ben was there, too, deprived of his wheels. Maddy felt bad about that, but not bad enough that she could bring herself to talk to him. When he tried talking to her, to ask how she was doing, she replied, I’m fine, and turned him off like a light switch. After that, he didn’t come over again. Then she stopped seeing him at all—they were assigned different duty shifts. Maddy wondered if he had specifically asked to be changed, just to avoid her.

  A couple of days a week she would meet Lakisha for lunch, and they would talk about their respective experiences. Maddy talked the most: This was her first chance to express her fears of being a human lab rat, or to ask one of her fellow rodents how they felt about it. But she didn’t learn much.

  Lakisha was practically born yesterday. Everything in Harmony was new and exciting to her, a brave new world. What Maddy didn’t understand was how she could already be so well versed in the trappings of trend-savvy young womanhood.

  “So how did you learn to look and act so normal?” Maddy asked, munching stuffed grape leaves. “You seem so together.”

  “It’s the implant. It lays out the pattern, and I just play connect-the-dots. I can’t believe it myself! You say normal, but for me it doesn’t feel normal at all—it feels incredibly exotic to fit in with these amazing superbeings that I’ve looked up to all my life. I feel like somebody handed me the keys to Camelot, and I’m just kind of sitting at the table, taking it all in.”

  “Wow, that must be … interesting. My experience has kinda been the exact opposite.” Maddy felt momentarily guilty about her own bitter skepticism.

  “I know. I wish you could see it the way I do. Just getting dressed in the morning is so awesome, and shopping—forget it. I love clothes! You know I was always into dress-up, because I thought that was part of the secret of being normal. And it totally is! But it’s so much better now that I can really comprehend all the little nuances of fashion.”

  “I guess. You sure that’s a good thing?”

  “Are you kidding? I love it! I just wish my friend Stephanie could see me now.”

  “Stephanie?”

  “Yeah, in junior high, I used to hang out at the mall all the time with this girl Stephanie. She loved shopping, man.”

  Maddy blinked, trying to make sense of the coincidence. “You had a friend named Stephanie?”

  “Yeah! Why, did you know her?”

  “No,” Maddy said. “I must be thinking of somebody else.”

  AS the days went by, Maddy fell into the routines of working, eating, sleeping, bathing, laundry. When she got her first week’s pay, it came as a bit of a surprise—she had forgotten about this part of it. Depositing the check, she made her first debt payment, compounded with interest, but also had to leave enough money to live on. After taxes and multifarious other charges, it was not much. At that rate, the debt would never go away … which was the whole point. Her coworkers laughed it off: That’s how they get you!

  In her few moments of free time, Maddy downloaded music onto her PDA and stayed in her room at the motel to avoid browsing the stores. There were no televisions or computers anywhere in Harmony. At first she found it extremely odd, until it occurred to her that any kind of commercially sponsored medium was outmoded technology here. Who needed advertising when companies could pitch directly to your brain, all their products singing like a heavenly choir? TV was obsolete!

  Eventually, she’d have to shop again, but she tried putting it off as long as possible. It was like being a drug addict, and she knew they were in fact tickling the same parts of her brain as alcohol, nicotine, or heroin. She understood that very well, yet knowing was no defense against the growing sense of sick yearning that hung like a ball and chain from her heart.

  To keep her mind off it, she listened to music and obsessively rearranged the contents of her cabinets. There it was: all the stuff she had bought during her binge—nonsensical items like an extension cord and a cordless drill, a rectal thermometer, a neck brace. Some things made obvious sense—the tiny travel kits for sewing and manicuring—but what did she need with ten bottles of toothache remedy?

  She also started cleaning fanatically, scrubbing and sterilizing every metal object with antibacterial soap, alcohol, or boiling water, then rolling them all up in plastic bags.

  Everything was going along fine until she saw Lakisha with Ben.

  It was two weeks after her arrival back in Harmony. Maddy was up on a utility pole fixing a blown transformer that hadn’t been grounded properly—typical. There were much better ways to do everything, but nobody on the crew listened when she spoke, so she had stopped bothering. Morons. If they wanted stuff to work like crap, so be it.

  Glancing down at the park, she saw Ben. He was walking toward the bandstand, hands in his pockets, looking cool as ever with his lazy, confident strides. She had been thinking a lot about Ben lately, wondering if she should seek him out and talk to him. Ask him about Denton … and their folks. Chances were, he knew less than she did. But it wouldn’t hurt to talk to him.

  Ben waved at someone, and suddenly Maddy saw Lakisha running from the bandstand to meet him. They embraced, kissing, then walked away arm in arm. They were obviously in love.

  That night, Maddy found a dead raccoon in her bathtub.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  FISSURE

  IT was bedtime. Maddy had just finished brushing her teeth when she glanced over, and there it was. The poor thing looked like roadkill, its fur clotted into black fins, its skull crushed and bloody teeth bared and clenched together in a frozen snarl. Its little fez was flattened as if it had been stomped on.

  Maddy caught her breath, then left the bathroom and turned off the light.

  Yes, she thought. Okay. I get it.

  Keeping her mind focused on inconsequential details, Maddy donned her PDA’s ear-buds, set its music playlist to start with Mozart’s Requiem, and turned off all the lights. Then she took the chair and nightstand from the main room and placed them beside the bathtub. She couldn’t see the raccoon anymore, couldn’t see anything in the total darkness. That was good; it meant the hidden cameras probably couldn’t see much either. The difference was that Maddy didn’t need her eyes to know exactly where she was. There was already a perfect 3-D model of the room in her head. Its clarity and interactivity were far greater than the crude stereopticon of human eyesight.

  Gathering items from the cabinets, she laid them out beside the tub, then stepped in and closed the shower curtain. Just in case of infrared surveillance.

  Taking her clothes off, she hung them on the curtain rod and sat down in the tub. Opening a portable grooming kit, she removed an electric razor and used it to shave the new hair from her scalp, taking extra care around the tender scar tissu
e. Then she vacuumed herself with a DustBuster and cleaned her hands and scalp with alcohol wipes. That stung.

  She stripped an extension cord and twisted the copper wiring around a piece of nichrome from the toaster, wrapped it thickly in insulating tape, and plugged it in. Finally, she put on the neck brace, good and rigid, and propped herself up with rolled towels.

  Using a razor-sharp matte knife in one hand, she cut into her head—sliced right down to the bone, drawing the blade in a semicircle along the anterior rim of the implant. With her other hand, she squirted the incision with concentrated phenol she had distilled from over-the-counter medication. The pain, bright at first as an electric arc, dimmed to a dull orange throbbing. Blood gushed freely down the back of her head and neck, soaking into the towels, until Maddy clamped the vessels with a staple gun. She also stapled back the crescent flap of scalp she had opened, baring the round, enameled disk of her implant. About the size of a silver dollar, it was flush with the surrounding bone, smoother but just as hard, glued in place with a bonding agent similar to dental cement.

  The technology of the thing held no mysteries to her, and she didn’t hesitate to crack it open with a power drill. On its reverse side was the RF coil, and underneath that was the Ultra Low Power Bluetooth transceiver, held in place by tiny recessed screws.

  Taking a microscrewdriver from an eyeglass repair kit, Maddy fastened it to the drill and pulled the screws, then carefully unpacked the shielded RF module and GPS unit. There was enough play in the wires to allow access to the signal processor beneath, and Maddy located the data port. Everything was hugely magnified, a holographic image extrapolated from materials she had read at Braintree.

  It did not escape her notice that she was below the level of her skull, tinkering in a cavity that penetrated an inch or more into her brain—the part known as the fissure of Rolando. She didn’t dwell on it.

  Crudely unhousing the guts of her PDA, she cannibalized it for parts, using the red-hot insulated needle as a soldering gun to install a two-way serial-port connection in her head, brazing an entirely new circuit path out of mercury amalgam (from the rectal thermometer). This enabled her to do something the Braintree doctors never intended: communicate with the system.

  Her microprocessor was now a two-way street.

  It was a very strange sensation. She could feel structures forming in her head, see and hear and touch them, clear as objects floating in space. Crystalline trees sprouted in the darkness, branching and growing into vast, intricate forests that merged in all directions to cover the void with fractal wilderness.

  But the forest was off-limits—something was blocking the view, and when Maddy tried to move forward, she couldn’t. Of course: The spreading filaments had become a mesh, and the mesh had tightened to become a fence. NO TRESPASSING. It was a block cipher—a wall of numerical gibberish that had to be unscrambled with an entry PIN. A sphinx.

  Fine, be that way, she thought.

  The PIN number was based on a custom algorithm, designated E22—an encryption mechanism she had encountered before. To crack it, Maddy reentered the loading protocol, opening an emulated serial-port connection to establish a multiplexer control channel and a peer RFCOMM entity using L2CAP service primitives. To start the RFCOMM device, she sent an SABM command on DLC10 and awaited a UA response from the peer entity. When the response came, she was able to passively eavesdrop on the pairing process and spoof the code.

  Nothing to it.

  As the gate fell, Maddy fell with it—a distinct sensation of tripping forward, Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole. Not just any rabbit hole—these were AutoCAD diagrams of the tunnel leading from Braintree to Harmony, and Maddy was not so much moving through it as it was feeding past her, a great volume of information assembling itself as fast as it could load the data … which (with her sluggish, improvised connection) was really not that fast.

  But she was in the machine.

  THIRTY-SIX

  ASTROTURF

  THE whole layout of the place was visible to her as a three-dimensional model, a CGI transcape comprised of live video feeds and digital renderings, incorporating every technical detail of its construction.

  At the same time, there was a ghostly overlying design that seemed oddly to mirror the Braintree architecture, and it took Maddy a moment to grasp that she was not only traveling through the back corridors of the medical-industrial complex but through the inner reaches of her own neural implant. She was a fly inside her own head, zooming down the bundle of ultrafine wires that led from the 2.4835 GHz signal processor to the very core of her brain. The wires looked as massive as cables on a suspension bridge.

  Down, down, as though descending into a mine shaft, Maddy penetrated her own cerebrum, diving through folds of white matter as thick as the mantle of the Earth, then entering the thinner corpus callosum, the choroid plexus, the thalamus. She emerged in the lateral ventricles as though entering a vast cave system—four caverns like subterranean finger lakes full of cerebrospinal fluid … in which she could see something that shouldn’t have been there.

  What the hell …?

  Rather than just stopping at the terminal ends of the electrodes, the wires forked to join a pair of large, podlike objects. They looked huge to her, ominous as docked zeppelins. Machines, but not made of metal. Living machines: fat, neuron-rich sausages webbed in pulsing blood vessels, bristling with nerve fibers. Twin lobes of the alien intelligence that had taken up residence in her skull. Permanent as ships in a bottle.

  Maddy could see the whole process: how these things had been grown here, cultured like a pair of giant, misshapen pearls, intelligent tumors that gave her the ice-cold reasoning power to do all the terrible things she had done in the name of survival. Even to do what she was doing at that moment.

  And Maddy could see the point of it all, the master plan behind it, which was not, after all, simply to enslave humanity but to save it. To enforce obedience, yes, but only so that the goals of an ideal society could be realized. People were idiots, that was the general theme, which scads of scientific research proved beyond a doubt. The data was all at her fingertips, going way back to Plato’s Republic: If granted complete freedom—true democracy—human beings would invariably screw it up.

  So a few big brains dedicated themselves to a solution.

  They quickly discovered that they weren’t the only ones: There was a whole network of scientists at work on the same problem, and a lot of research money for anyone with a promising hypothesis. A private research foundation was paying big bucks for insights into the perfection of mankind. Hence it was under the shady auspices of the Mogul Cooperative that Alan Plummer and Chandra Stevens founded their company: Braintree, Inc.

  Look, Alan had said in a taped lecture dated November 13, 2002, all you have to do is look at all of history to know the human race will never overcome its basically selfish, brutal tendencies. Every organization, every religion, every civilization from the beginning of time to the present has been built on the notion of getting people to live together in harmony … and every one, no matter how oppressively or progressively it imposed its laws, has failed. Failed miserably. Education is no good—even lessons learned through painful experience are unlearned by the next generation. Look at Vietnam and Iraq. There’s a willfulness to the forgetting, a fundamental inclination to repeat past mistakes, to ignore established facts, to deny cause and effect. Clearly, something new has to be done to break the cycle once and for all, to move the species forward. Because unless something is done soon, our civilization will fall. It’s statistically inevitable. And even if Homo sapiens don’t go completely extinct, all our higher virtues—the hard-won advances in medicine and technology, in knowledge of the universe, in music and literature and art—will be swept away. Vanish as though they never existed.

  Avoiding this future required a new way of thinking. Tricky choices were coming, dangerous waters that would require clear judgment to navigate, bold decisions unclouded by religiou
s hysteria or unreasonable opposition. The Singularity was coming.

  Godhood was coming.

  Not to everyone—that was neither feasible nor desirable—but to an educated elite, a privileged few. The Moguls.

  Maddy saw this word, this acronym, MOGUL, cropping up again and again, and finally traced it to its source: Miska Orthotics and Gerontology Underwriters Laboratories. That was the source of it all, the silent partner of dozens of private research foundations around the world, a vast blanket entity of which Braintree, Inc., was only one thread.

  So that was it. Technological breakthroughs had been made that enabled people to replace almost any body part with an excellent prosthetic substitute: legs that could walk, hands that could touch, eyes that could see, ears that could hear, flesh and organs with not only the suppleness and sensitivity of living tissue, but which could perform their functions every bit as well as the originals, if not better, and which could be replaced as needed. Throw-away hearts, disposable bodies … all for a price.

  And the ultimate replacement: the self.

  From what Maddy could determine, scanning volumes of classified material, the process was modular—an incremental replacement of knowledge, swapping blocks of damaged, decaying, or dead organic neurons with artificial ones. In that way, acres of messy old synaptic pathways could be plowed under to make way for a neat, orderly crop of sweet American corn.

  With proper conditioning, the brain adapted to the changes, planting over the rough spots, cleaning up corrupted data, until eventually the person’s whole mind was converted to the new medium—a more durable and easily replaceable medium than the soft tissue of the human brain. Astroturf. One-Use-Only was now Multiple-Use … or even Infinite-Use. Maddy could hardly believe it, but the scientific data didn’t lie.