by Scott Cramer
Ashminov lowered his eyes.
Baldini moved the tryp into his field of vision. “Care for a taste?”
Ashminov dipped a fingertip and sampled the product, feeling at once a surge of confidence that shifted his attitude. “How long will I be in Boston?”
Baldini shrugged. “Three days, four at the most. The V7 transmission is happening in 48 hours.”
Ashminov doubled the estimated timeframe. Eight days. That’s a long time to be away from home. He pursed his lips. No, it’s time I make a break from the priest's control and move on. He’d download the lionware to Baldini free of charge, hand over the Bibleware, and flush the tryp.
“That drum of tryp I showed you?” Baldini added. “When you return from Boston, it’s yours.”
“All of it?”
Baldini placed his hand over his heart. “One hundred kilos.”
Ashminov chewed his lip. “And Raissa will meet me at the airport?”
Baldini's mouth curled into a smile. “Not if you miss your flight.” He bowed his head. “Please download the Bibleware to my chip. Ever since Version 3, I've been wandering lost in the wilderness.”
Ashminov spotted an enormous gold ring on Baldini's finger.
Baldini noticed his gaze and held out his hand. “Do you like the Papal ring? The Pope suffocated during devotional prayer. Sadly, I wasn't able to get him solid oxygen pellets in time.”
Baldini didn't look sad.
“You let him suffocate?” Ashminov said as the room spun.
“Strong words, Christian. Soon the flock will number in the billions, and his Holiness wasn’t getting any younger. I merely sent him home to rest.”
“Home?”
“The Pope’s faith should earn him a room on the top floor if you get my gist,” Baldini said.
“I don’t get it.”
“Heaven,” Baldini replied with a spreading grin, appearing to weather the forbidden term with ease.
Ashminov suppressed his shock. He couldn’t let Baldini get away with murder. “I need to make one small change to the M-code.”
“Please hurry,” Baldini implored. “You have a flight to catch.”
Ashminov turned to his mindport and opened the brain-mapping application. Using the search field, he entered the term “lust.” The hippocampus and limbic lobe both lit up, and he copied the coordinates and pasted them into the lionware code. He wasn't sure what the effect of these new impulses would be, though he could hazard a guess. He burned a lionware V2 chip and inserted it into the trans. “Are you ready, Father?”
Baldini raised his chin and closed his eyes. Ashminov pressed the wand against the priest's forehead and engaged the transmission. “Done,” he said, after the beep.
Baldini blinked. “Somehow I expected to experience a rebirth of faith. Are you sure it worked?”
“I’m sure,” Ashminov said, stuffing the ticket and the tryp into his satchel. Baldini’s troubled eyes followed him as he stepped into the hallway. “Father, please close the door when you leave.”
ANALYSIS
ANALYSIS: PHASE 01
Caleb approached Gate 5D at the northwest corner of the NanoArtisans campus and stood in line with other employees going to their labs. Exhausted from a miserable night's sleep, and still grief-stricken over Julian's tragic death, he looked forward to the much-needed relief of a software patch.
When it was his turn to enter the campus, he glanced into the retinal scanner, and his chip ID flashed green on the monitor. A paladin guard waved him on. He stepped inside the next security tier, a cylindrical tunnel twenty meters long and ten in diameter. The whir of blister guns tracking him made the hairs on the back of his neck stand rigid. He attributed his irrational fear to his faulty chip.
Outside the tunnel, a robotic voice crackled, “Good morning, Dr. Saunders. You’re scheduled to meet Dr. Aubrey in Version Control at 7:20 a.m., 15 minutes and 20 seconds from now. Your first patient of the day is Dr. Gabriel Mars at 9:30 a.m.”
Caleb hopped onto a scooter, slipped into the gyroscopic harness, and rode across the campus to the Ada Lovelace Building. In front of the twenty-story structure he dismounted, and the scooter rolled away. He entered the lobby and took the elevator to the top floor.
Dr. Aubrey was talking on her messenger when he stepped into Version Control. Long red hair fell to her lab coat, a utilitarian garment which failed to conceal her gorgeous figure. Fifteen years his senior, she oversaw the release of new chip versions.
Caleb strolled to the window and looked down at the Union Square Injection Center, which reminded him of yesterday's horrible event. He reached into his pocket and touched Julian's carbon tab for a dose of relief.
He switched his mind to a more cheerful subject.
“Oh, you think so?” Dr. Aubrey said a moment later.
Startled, Caleb turned. The scientist was a meter away, holding up her messenger which reported his real-time thought output. He dreaded what the algorithm had reported. “What was I thinking?” he asked.
Dr. Aubrey raised her brows. “I have lovely breasts.”
After she showed him her messenger, the tips of Caleb’s ears burned, and he shifted his gaze to her eyes, not daring to let his eyes wander down her white lab coat. “Did the algorithm also report I’m impressed by your intelligence and analytical capabilities?”
“Spoken like a true neural coder. Caleb, do you remember my promise to you?”
He nodded. “What happens in my head stays in this lab.”
She drummed her fingers on the messenger. “Have I kept my word?”
“Yes.” He trusted Dr. Aubrey completely.
She made a sweeping gesture with her arm. “We can’t control what our imagination stitches together. I will never judge you for what you think.”
Thank you, he thought.
Dr. Aubrey dropped her eyes to her messenger. “You're welcome. Shall we begin?”
After three months in the beta chip program, Caleb knew the drill. He followed her to the examination pod, removed his shirt, and climbed inside. To record his vitals, Dr. Aubrey connected biometric pads to his chest and temples.
“Julian died yesterday during the injection procedure,” Caleb said as they waited for the results.
Her jaw dropped. “I'm so sorry. You were looking forward to your nephew receiving a nanochip.”
“I couldn't sleep last night. This morning I broke down and cried twice.”
“Classic symptoms of depression.” She jotted a note in her messenger. “You had mentioned your chip had a bug; I’ll log the issue. Unfortunately, you’ll have to wait a few more days for a patch. We’re scrambling to wrap up V7.”
Caleb groaned. He understood that he could not be her team’s priority, but it was frustrating nonetheless.
“What went wrong with the injection procedure?” she asked. “Was the ricin released?”
He shrugged. “I’ve never heard of that happening.”
“Dr. Joyce is a whiz at solving puzzles. She’ll identify what happened to Julian.”
Caleb had not thought of that, but it was a good idea. Dr. Joyce, the Director of Horizon Research, was his NanoArtisans mentor. “Thanks for the suggestion.”
“How are Zoe and Jack doing?”
“Their chips dissolved their grief,” Caleb replied with a jealous sigh.
“Isn’t it wonderful how technology ends suffering? Have they gone to the genetarium yet? Designing a new child will help them focus on the future.”
“I’m sure they’ll go soon.”
His vitals appeared on the examination pod's digital readout, and Dr. Aubrey removed the biometric pads. Caleb stepped out of the machine, pulling his shirt on.
Moving to her office, they sat before her mindport, where she called up his thought output from the previous day. Chunks of text, some garbled, flashed on the monitor. Dr. Aubrey pointed out the first legible phrase logged at 9:45:16 a.m. Save me. “Care to elaborate?”
“Zoe was grilling me ag
ain.”
“About your social life?”
Caleb rolled his eyes. “What else?”
“For what it’s worth, Caleb, I agree with your sister. You need to find someone special.”
Caleb was glad that Dr. Aubrey wasn’t monitoring his real-time output because he was thinking that her social life was every bit as non-existent as his own.
She directed his attention to the next thought grouping logged at 9:54:11 a.m. No, no, no. Not again! “Let me guess,” she said. “An encounter with your brother-in-law?”
“Jack put down the whole idea of Julian getting a chip.” A knot formed in Caleb’s stomach. If Jack had his way, Julian would be alive now.
Dr. Aubrey sighed. “Some paladins don’t know how good they have it.”
They continued the analysis. The term tragedy had a time stamp of 11:01:10 a.m. Caleb cringed, and Dr. Aubrey skipped over it.
One block of thoughts, peppered with curses, remained. “Well, the algorithm gets an A+,” Caleb said. “That was my viola practice session.”
“Do you remember when you first had trouble playing the viola?” she asked. “I’ve done some research.”
He nodded. “I remember it well; it happened on my sixth birthday. Prodigy one minute, neophyte the next.”
“Interesting. It appears you received an M-code patch the day you turned six years old.” Dr. Aubrey called up a patch on her messenger.
Breathless, Caleb lurched forward and stared at the strange symbols of the morphing programming language. “Dr. Petrov gave it to me?”
She grinned. “I’d say yes. Nobody else understands M-code.”
“And you think the patch made it difficult for me to play the viola?”
“The timing suggests it. And then you received a second M-code patch yesterday.” She pulled up the new code and handed him the messenger.
After scrolling through screen after screen of syntax, Caleb opened the developer notes. There was an equation.
Caleb instructed the messenger to plot it, and a dark red X appeared onscreen. “What does that mean?”
Dr. Aubrey shrugged and took back her messenger. “All I know is that Dr. Petrov has something special in mind for young Dr. Saunders. Would you like me to send you the code?”
“Yes, I’ll treasure it forever.”
Caleb was still buzzing with excitement when he stepped out of the Ada Lovelace Building. Dr. Petrov downloaded M-code to my chip not once, but twice! Then the shadow of Julian's death dampened his joy.
He checked the time to see if he could squeeze in a visit with Dr. Joyce before his first patient of the day arrived. It would be tight.
He hurried to the Guido van Rossum Building, boarded the elevator, and got off on the twentieth floor. He lifted his chin and pulled his shoulders back as he stepped into the lab where the world’s most advanced research took place. Dr. Joyce would respond best if he projected a zest for life, rather than moping around her with a basketful of unproductive emotions.
He spotted her in the far corner at work on some kind of experiment. At thirty-eight, she was a NanoArtisans elder. Her shaved head displayed a DNA double helix tattoo.
She beamed when she saw him. “How's my favorite V7 beta tester?”
“Busy,” he said, noting her experiment. A monitor showed six rats sharing a cage. On the lab bench were six rat brains inside test tubes. Suspended in a nutrient gel, the brains looked like pink raisins floating in strands of tiny oxygen bubbles. Not wasting any more time, Caleb told her about Julian and then held up the carbon tab, evidence that his nephew was gone and the data of his short existence archived.
“Strange,” she said. “I’d like to keep the tab and run some tests.”
A chasm opened in Caleb’s heart when he gave it to her. Like a stone wedged into a dam, the tab had limited his sorrow to a steady drip. Now his grief gushed out in a deluge, and he choked out a sob.
Dr. Joyce, clearly uncomfortable at his shocking outburst, looked away. “Let’s get Julian’s blood report.”
“My beta chip has a bug,” he offered.
“It must be difficult.”
“Dr. Joyce, you have no idea. Can I ask about your experiment?”
“We're testing peer-to-peer telepathy.”
Caleb flushed with excitement. “The Eden Chip?”
She nodded. “The brain inside each sarcophagus has a prototype Eden Chip.”
“Sarcophagus?”
“The ancient Egyptians buried mummies in a sarcophagus. Dr. Petrov prefers that we refer to each test tube as a carbonite sarcophagus.” She winked. “I think of them as test tubes.”
Caleb pointed to the monitor. One rat was nibbling a pear with disinterest, and two were sitting still. Two more were grooming each other with their tongues at a painfully slow pace. “The rats are communicating telepathically?”
“That’s right. But they have no perception that their brains are out of their bodies. Each rat brain is producing the sense of touch, smell, taste.”
He whistled softly. “Their Eden Chips let them relate to each other as if they are real?”
“Precisely.”
“Dr. Joyce, none of them look happy.”
“An astute observation, Dr. Saunders. The physical challenges of life, of survival, of navigating through our environment, are what engage and stimulate the mind. The rats have all their needs met. They’re bored. My colleagues and I call it the Paradise Syndrome.”
“Dr. Petrov will find a way to add excitement to Paradise,” Caleb offered.
“Agreed. He’d never convert the world's population into eight billion slugs.”
Caleb checked the time. “My first patient is arriving in twenty minutes.”
They hurried to her mindport where he gave her Julian’s chip ID. She entered into the Finder app and frowned at the result. “Finder reports your nephew is at Leonardo da Vinci Airport—in Rome.”
Puzzled, Caleb confirmed that the ID was correct. He spelled Julian's full name and told her the approximate time of his death. A revised search pulled up the right profile.
She retrieved the blood work, and her frown returned. “Julian had a toxic substance in his system: polychlorinated biphenyl. It belongs to a class of synthetic oils once used in generators. They banned PCBs decades ago.”
Caleb shuddered, recalling that Jack had found a drum of PCBs buried in the banks of the Charles River. Is it possible that Jack accidentally poisoned his son? No, Jack understands how to handle toxic substances. Jack, who had loathed the idea of Julian receiving a chip, had changed the infant's diaper in private, moments before they had all left for the injection center. Jack had the means, the method, and the motive to commit an unspeakable act. Should I report him? Security paladins would take Jack to the hospital for a memory scrub, which some in Caleb’s lab referred to as a paladin lobotomy. Jack would lose all recollection of Zoe, Julian, Caleb. He would know nothing about Boston or the Charles River. Then, so he would still be useful to society, they would send him away to clean up radiation hot spots in a different country.
What if I take matters into my own hands? He had attributed his brother-in-law’s prickly personality to the simple fact Jack didn’t like him, but what if his chip had malfunctioned? Jack can’t be blamed for that, can he? Zoe loved Jack, and Jack loved his wife. Caleb was confident that he could rehabilitate Jack with a chip reboot.
“Do you have any idea how your nephew could have been exposed? Your sister might have an old electrical capacitor lying around the house, perhaps in the basement.”
Dr. Joyce’s voice startled him, and he hoped she could not hear his galloping heart. He worked up saliva in his parched mouth. “Dr. Joyce, an investigation can upend lives for weeks. I have enough information to address the issue with Zoe and Jack.”
“I understand that your sister and her husband want to move on with their lives, but you need to identify the source of the PCBs. We wouldn’t want child number two to meet the same fate.”
&
nbsp; “No, Dr. Joyce, we wouldn’t want that to happen. I’ll see what I can find out.”
ANALYSIS: PHASE 02
Raissa glanced at the tracking map projected onto the jet’s ceiling. They were in the stratosphere over the Atlantic, seven hundred kilometers from the East Coast of the United States. She put on her readers to digest her favorite training manual, Pride and Prejudice, and the ruby laser drilled over a hundred thousand words into her consciousness within minutes.
Goldstein had given her the novel written by Jane Austen two hundred and fifty years ago, encouraging her to pick up valuable tactics that would help her handle the NanoArtisans employee in Boston.
Raissa admired the main characters, Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy; Elizabeth was the rebel and Mr. Darcy her mark. The pair engaged in a strategic dance of moves and countermoves that involved deceptions and suspected deceptions. They had arguments followed by civil conversations and vice versa. Raissa always wondered what they saw in each other, as they were opposites. Although she rooted for Elizabeth, who always spoke her mind, she developed a soft spot for Mr. Darcy toward the end of the novel. He loved Elizabeth and never gave up his pursuit of her until they fell deeply in love with one another and lived happily ever after.
Removing the readers, Raissa returned to the cold reality that the encounter she’d have with Caleb Saunders would have a different ending.
When her ears popped, she knew the jet was making a quick descent from the stratosphere and looked out the window; they were circling over Boston. The city matched the satellite imagery she had studied. She was able to identify the Prudential Tower, one of Boston’s shorter skyscrapers, and the Public Garden, full of grass and trees, a kilometer north.
The jet maintained altitude, level with a fleet of blimps—ten times more than she had ever seen in the skies over Jerusalem. She pressed her nose against the window to get a glimpse of the city. The Charles River meandered in from the west and emptied into Boston Harbor. The Citadel, home to Petrov and the Collective, sat next to the harbor. How will I breach it? The compound, seven kilometers long and two kilometers wide, was surrounded by a wall, eight stories tall.
