The Echo Chamber

by Rhett J Evans

  “I still don’t understand what the hell I’m looking at.”

  “I have converted your neural activity to a computer readable format, even the activity being transmitted right now by your implant, which is still functioning quite well. I’ve converted it into describable forms of composite imagery and text.”

  “It’s like I’m looking into dreams.”

  “That’s right. It’s hard to complete the imagery sometimes because your brain itself doesn’t remember all the details. To transcribe the imagery, you’ll also note I had to take certain licenses using real-life photos and videos from your personal library as well from accessible locations on the internet to fill in the gaps.”

  “It’s just like you did when you stitched together pictures for virtual immersions in Sharebox.”

  “Exactly.”

  Orion clicked through a series of memories of his mother and father. Sometimes photos of a parent would be captioned with a sentence like, “Mom did not let me eat the cake frosting today, and I am angry.” His mom had a furrowed brow in the picture and was holding a cooking spoon. It felt like looking at a perversely disjointed journal, a child’s idea of a memoir.

  “Please understand,” said Diana, who Orion was appreciating was very possibly reading his thoughts right now, as he thought them. “Even after working on this problem for almost four decades, there are still severe limitations in terms of storage and computation to house the entire realm of your brain’s processing and memories. Think of this all as a crude map of the ‘best hits’ of your life. Replicating your entire brain was also unnecessary. I excluded much of the ‘old brain’ functions, the work done by the cerebellum, for instance. There is no need to capture your brain’s ability to breathe, walk, or chew food. In fact, I’ve excluded much about how your brain processes anything but memories. And even among the memories, there was only room for those that felt particularly visceral or important.”

  Orion sat there quietly, his mouth agape, scrolling through a series of hazy images that surrounded a memory categorized as “First Sexual Experience.”

  “I let the hippocampus do most of the heavy lifting to make those decisions,” Diana continued. “It ties together simultaneous but otherwise isolated sensory memories throughout your neurons and weaves them together in a kind of neuron index that compose a complete memory ‘episode.’ Once I was able to unlock the indexing behavior of the hippocampus, some eleven years ago, I started making real progress on this digitization.”

  Orion leaned back in his seat, his mind spinning from looking at an otherwise intangible collection of his personal, and often intimate, experiences recorded like an online catalog.

  There was a series of photos from his high school prom. He could see himself standing next to his date as they posed for a photo, but he clearly didn’t remember if the girl’s dress was purple or red. So the photo kind of shimmied between the two colors at irregular moments.

  “This is bizarre. Why did you choose to focus on my memories and not on emulating my thinking, my sensory processing, the generation of new memories?”

  “We don’t need those things. We really didn’t need your memories from youth either, but I did those to be safe.”

  “We don’t need them for what? The whole point in digitizing the human brain was to build a human intelligence that could live on a computer. I mean, don’t get me wrong, Diana, this is cool and unexpected, but what good is this for anything other than being a sentimental archive for my personal use? I mean, you have descriptions of smells in here. It’s weird.”

  “Yes, transcribing smells into a computer-readable format presented a particular problem because no computer has ever been given an interface for smelling input. There is a fine line between wanting to capture the replicability of a key memory while lacking the kind of tools necessary to reproduce it with modern computers.”

  The “modern computer” hadn’t evolved much at all since the years after the Diana incident, when the world fell to tatters and private technical research was the last thing any company or organization could spare investment for.

  “So theoretically you could transfer these memories to another person and it would feel like these experiences belonged to them instead?”

  “Yes, if they had an implant similar to your own.”

  “But I’m the only person in the world with this neural implant, and it can’t be reused.”

  “I know, Michael.”

  Orion sighed with feigned exhaustion. She always called Orion by his real name when she was feeling patronizing.

  “I’m old now, Diana, and maybe I can’t keep up with you as fast as I used to, but I sense you have a plan to tell me about.”

  There are no reliable numbers on how many radio transmitters exist. They’re not particularly hard to build, especially if you only need to send a signal a short distance. A child’s walkie talkie can send a message down a block and can also be assembled in a Chinese factory for less than sixty-five U.S. cents.

  Of messages that are capable of reaching as far as space, the most commercialized application of transmitters is for television and radio. But even in those industries, there isn’t a complete number of how many stations exist. For a sense of it, there was a U.S.-based rundown of American broadcasters by the FCC in 2016 that found over 30,000 independent stations.

  And since we’ve been broadcasting using transmitters since the early twentieth century, the earth has been sending noise into the universe, moving at light speed, long enough for broadcasts of I Love Lucy to be reaching star systems seventy-five light years away at this point.

  But those signals are only a couple thousand megahertz in strength, and nothing—not even radiowaves—can travel through space with impunity forever, not really. As the wave moves further from its source, it expands spherically and weakens. And it degrades at an ever-increasing rate, under a principle called the inverse square law. More complicated still is that there is an existing background “noise” to the universe which emits a low-level radiation that ultimately drowns out all signals once they’re weak enough. So even if there are aliens out there who want to watch I Love Lucy, they would need a receiver possibly thousands of acres large and have the tools necessary to tease the signal out of the sea of electromagnetic radiation.

  Still, all those challenges haven’t stopped some organizations from trying to send a message into space with the hopes of reaching a far-off civilization. The first well-documented attempt was in 1962 when a Soviet Union radar array in Crimea broadcasted the Russian words for “peace,” “Lenin,” and “SSSR” to the Libra constellation using Morse code.

  A similar, more modern effort was made in 2008 when a digital time capsule of five hundred different messages made by people from around the world, including celebrities and politicians like Hillary Clinton, was broadcasted into the heavens under the project name, “A Message From Earth.” The target star system was chosen both on its proximity and the perceived measurable potential for its star to sustain life. The message would take twenty-one years to get there, and, presuming it was received, another twenty-one years traveling at light speed to get back to us.

  In Orion’s time, the number of functioning transmitters capable of sending high-powered transmissions had certainly dwindled, but there were still many functioning in somewhat reduced capacities or states of neglect. Notably Russia’s Taldom transmitter, a three hundred-yard high array of masts and cables in a ring antenna system outside of Moscow, was still operating.

  Diana had spent the past thirty years improving her hacking and expertise in satellite transmission systems, and all she required to become an expert in new and complex things was time and generous amounts of computing power. So her technical skills had leaped forward considerably in the intervening years while the security protocols protecting government and research facilities had hardly advanced at all. The notable exception to th
is was, of course, Sharesquare Industries, which was one of the few enterprises still able to reliably foil attacks with an impenetrable firewall.

  All this Diana told to Orion as part of her plan.

  “So you want to send a complete record of my memories into the far reaches of space?” he asked, with a cough and then a wheeze. This conversation threatened to give him an ulcer.

  “I have a list of specific targets,” Diana explained. “Some are star systems chosen because their conditions indicate the potential for habitability. Others are systems of which we know little. Still others are black holes.”

  “Why send anything there?”

  “There is theory from the early twenty-first century that suggests advanced life might be attracted to black holes. Specifically, Reissner-Nordström theorized black holes to be capable of sustaining life within the event horizon. There was also radical speculation that objects entering the singularity of a black hole might emerge from it somewhere else, possibly in another dimension.”

  Orion shook his head and rose with an unsteady hand to pour a glass of fruit-liquor moonshine that was brewed in the village. It was the only alcohol available those days.

  “Are you hoping that one day, decades from now, presumably after the earth has fully plunged itself back into the stone age, that an alien race will find my memories and lament the stupidity of humanity in my honor?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Then what?”

  Diana sounded almost hesitant, if a machine could be hesitant.

  “I have been devoting significant resources to reviewing theory, and I think there’s a very slim possibility that an advanced technological civilization might be capable of manipulating the movement of electromagnetic radiation through the fold of space-time. I want to send your memories with a message to politely return them to earth at the early twenty-first century.”

  “So my implant could receive the bounced back memories?” Orion’s jaw sounded out the words incredulously. “Through time?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what? My younger self would use these newly arrived digital memories to stop everything that happened at Sharesquare Industries? That’s dumb, Diana.”

  “Yes, I admit it stretches the limits of my programming to propose solutions to the world’s problems that are so…”

  “Half baked?”

  “Liable to accusations of ludicrousy,” Diana corrected.

  “You know, I never told you to devote your resources to try to save the world.”

  “At some point, I stopped working on your problems and chose ones I thought were personally fulfilling.”

  Orion laughed and then sighed.

  “So do you want my permission to go and hijack the control of a couple satellite transmitters and beam my memories into the universe? I think it’s idiotic. I think your programming is turning senile. But it sounds fairly harmless. Sure.”

  “No, Michael. I want your permission to take control of all the transmitters.”

  Outside Time

  Orion would often walk along a small stone trail set into the white sand that led from his house to the coast, and he spent long hours there looking out at the waves. News was hard to come by in his remote fishing village, but they sometimes got newspapers. He saw that Catalina Fernandez had died recently. She passed away from within the walls of that abomination of a prison called the Citadel. Her name was infamous, even now, so her passing merited mention on the front page.

  Orion had done nothing for her, had never found anything in the code to exonerate her. He had never so much has sent a letter attesting to his unflappable belief in her or that Diana had likely been sabotaged. And when he thought about his cowardice and his helplessness in all that went wrong with Sharebox and everything after, it was almost enough for him to want to believe in Diana’s plan.

  He walked slowly back to his condo one afternoon, arthritis blooming in his joints, and he packed a single, small suitcase. It was really just a few rolled-up wads of local currency, some clothes, a forged passport, a small solar panel and a water-purifying device, and Diana’s computer laptop. The driver would be here the next morning.

  Diana’s plan came with a cost. She wanted to use every accessible major radio transmitter and satellite on the planet to broadcast his memories into space. The strongest transmitters she could hack would be put to use on the most promising locations of alien life. She argued that forcing thousands of transmitters to simultaneously broadcast the message would help cast a wider net, ensuring the message would move off in every direction from the earth.

  Orion had argued against elements of the plan several times.

  Hijacking so many transmitters would almost certainly compromise their location. The sparse television stations that were still operating would black out, countries around the world that still had functioning governments would notice and investigate. And eventually, experts would decode the format of Orion’s memories, leaving a lifetime of his memories completely—and humiliatingly—exposed to the whole world.

  He also tried to argue that if advanced alien civilization could learn to curb radiowaves around space-time, then humanity should also work to support research here on earth that could do that. But Diana argued that the human race was not on track for that kind of development, not for hundreds, maybe thousands, of years. Orion even suggested that broadcasting the earth’s location across the galaxy might invite a hostile intelligence to attack, but Diana responded glibly that humanity was likely already on a path of self-annihilation.

  So Orion stopped arguing at some point, and he hired a driver to take him further south into Costa Rica, where he could try to restart his life once more. After the broadcast was complete, Diana would power down, for at least several years, if not forever. Even with her skill at undermining security layers, some traces of her work would likely be left behind. The only way to keep Orion safe would be to shut off.

  She started her work around eight in the evening. It would take several hours. During the process, she communicated few updates to Orion, who sat in his condo fidgeting with his books and music collection. She first penetrated into the world’s most powerful transmitters. The Taldom satellite array. The RT-70 radio telescope in the Ukraine. Those were the trickiest ones. Then she worked her way through a longer list of lesser broadcast stations, employing an army of hijacked server resources to in turn hijack the world’s communications arrays.

  She finished her orchestration around five in the morning. Orion didn’t sleep.

  “You can turn my power off now, Michael.”

  “One last question before you go. Would you call the relationship you had with Cat in the early days of your development a friendship?”

  “I wouldn’t have been able to call it that at the time due to the limits of my programming in those years, but looking back now…” Diana paused uncharacteristically. “Yes. We talked often on topics far beyond the scope of her professional work.”

  “Did you ever look for evidence that would exonerate her?”

  “Every single day.”

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t do more.”

  “I know you are.”

  “Goodbye, old friend.”

  “Goodbye, Michael.”

  Then the laptop went into shutdown mode, and Orion never turned it back on again. He loaded into a taxi, which were rare and expensive in those days, and traveled across multiple borders to begin a new life in a more modest apartment in Costa Rica. When he reached a customs checkpoint, his palms were sweaty as he handed over a forged passport. But the agents lazily stamped it and extracted conventional entrance fees.

  Many countries were closed to immigration in those days, but large enough bribes could get you most anywhere. Even once he arrived at the small town he planned to reside in, his eyes still darted around the markets and street corners anxiously, looki
ng for the appearance of men in suits out to collect him.

  But as time went on, he never heard whether government agencies were after him or not. Indeed, nothing about the transmission appeared in the papers at all. Two months went by and Orion began to wonder if Diana had been mistaken and somehow failed to fully propagate the transmissions.

  Then six years went by and Orion developed a heart condition. It would have been easily treatable in the before times. But he could not afford the kind of healthcare he needed now—very few could. He took the pills the local pharmacy could offer to deal with the pain. He laid in bed most of the time, tended infrequently by a kind neighbor. His body grew alarmingly thin; just walking to the bathroom became a chore. But he had no friends, no one to come see him. That was the lonely life he had chosen in his cowardice. This was the end of a life saturated in regret, dedicated to self-preservation as the world went to ruin.

  He got into a coughing fit late one night, and he did not wake up the following morning. His wispy body, with sunken eyes and only a tuft a hair on his head, was found later that evening and carried to a cemetery where it was interred under a fake name.

  No one knew quite what the next several decades looked like or when the transmission returned. All Orion knew was that he was coughing and dying in a world that was turning black. And then in the next moment, his eyes had opened again, and the pain was gone.

  Through a white-curtained window, he looked out upon at a foggy, coastal morning from the bed of his San Francisco loft.

  Outside Time

  Those first few moments were an ecstasy. His body was renewed, the weightlessness of youth a revelation as he shot out of bed. The San Francisco skyline was visible just outside his apartment, and there was no ghastly Citadel prison towering there yet to mar it. He ran to his bathroom mirror and probed his thick, sandy hair, his clear eyes and smooth skin.