Soulminder

by Timothy Zahn

  People weren’t simply numbers in a logbook, or even names and faces. They were more. Far, far more.

  And Soulminder had given them hope.

  But as he’d already noted, that hope was not for all of them. For some of them, hope had long since crumbled away.

  It was time to fix that.

  Sommer strengthened himself. And then, as loudly as a soul could shout, he shouted.

  May I have your attention, please?

  For a long moment he couldn’t tell if anything had happened. The code he’d written should allow this kind of communication between all the traps across the world. Possibly it was that code that was also allowing him to sense the other souls’ presence and thoughts.

  But there had been no way to test it in advance. If he’d been wrong …

  And then, he sensed the minds and hearts and souls turning toward him. Who are you? a sense of question flowed across him. How do you speak thus with us?

  I am Adrian Sommer, he answered. I created Soulminder to protect you, and to hold you until you could be made whole again.

  There was a sort of stirring, and one of the swirling mixtures of anger and hopelessness seemed to come forward. Yet we are not being protected, it said. Not all of us. Some are being held prisoner against our will. Some desire nothing more than to escape, and to move on from this world to the next.

  I know that now, Sommer said. Please believe that I never intended this to happen. Without my consent or knowledge, my creation has been turned to evil.

  Your words bring no comfort, the voice said, turning accusing and bitter. If you did not intend this, why do you not open our prison and let us go?

  Sommer braced himself. I have, he said. Your prison is now open. You may leave whenever you wish.

  A ripple of fresh emotion passed through the shades. We may leave?

  Yes, Sommer said. I have added a provision to the traps in which you reside that will allow you to depart whenever you choose. You must push toward the Light, and keep on pushing. When you reach it, you will be free.

  It is difficult, the voice said doubtfully.

  That is by design, Sommer assured him. I do not want anyone to leave accidentally or merely on a sudden whim. The door is only for those who truly have no more interest in the hope that Soulminder was meant to give the sick and the injured.

  The voice fell silent. All the voices did. A sense of anticipation flowed over the assembled shades.

  And then, slowly, the exodus began.

  The first was one of the political prisoners who was being endlessly tortured. Sommer didn’t know how he knew that, but he did. The second was another prisoner, as was the third, the fourth, and the fifth. The sixth was an old woman whose family had forced her to continue living, despite her desire to die, so that the family business would stay in her sons’ hands instead of being transferred to the stockholders. The seventh was a man on death row who’d been stabbed by another inmate and just wanted it all to be over.

  One by one, they left. Dozens, then hundreds. Sommer watched each of them pass by, feeling a deepening sense of guilt as he saw how many of them were prisoners. He’d known that Soulminder was being abused, but he’d never dreamed that the abuse was so widespread.

  Still, most of the shades, over three hundred thousand of them, remained with him, watching the departures but making no attempt to join with them.

  And with that realization, some of Sommer’s guilt began to ease. For the vast majority, Soulminder was still a source of hope.

  As for the tyrants, they would quickly realize that their schemes had become useless. It was the tormented prisoner who now held the final card, not those who sought confession or information or even just revenge.

  And with the exit door buried within five billion lines of Soulminder code, it might never be found.

  Sommer had succeeded. His plan, and his code, had worked.

  Not just for this moment, but forever. Now that people were moving along the path, the rest of the code had activated, permanently marking the way. From this time onward, anyone who wanted or needed to make that ultimate escape would be able to do so.

  But there was still one more thing that had to be done.

  Because the tyrants might not care that a few of their victims had escaped them. The relative handful of others who chose to leave might be chalked up to isolated glitches in the system. Certainly Jessica Sands and the Soulminder board would attempt to downplay the losses.

  Sommer couldn’t risk that happening. The tyrants had to realize that Soulminder was no longer a one-hundred-percent guarantee that a prisoner casually tortured to death would not slip forever beyond their grasp. The casual body-borrowers who played with other people’s lives, dropping in and out of addicts or skydivers like they were putting on a suit of clothes, needed to believe that such a game might unexpectedly lead to their own deaths.

  Prisoner deaths could be hushed up. Malcontent deaths could be rationalized away.

  But there would be no rationalizing away the death of Dr. Adrian Sommer. Not after such a public attack. Not when everyone knew he’d already been into and come out of Soulminder once before.

  And if Soulminder’s own creator wasn’t safe from accidental death, who else would ever be?

  The Light looked like it was a long way away. But it wasn’t, really. Sommer pushed his way toward it, feeling like he was slogging through ankle-deep mud.

  And then, suddenly, the Light was all around him. Bracing himself, wishing fleetingly that he’d had the chance to say goodbye to Everly and Sands and Blanchard, he threw off the last tenuous hold of the trap around him and gave himself into the Light.

  And died.

  … only, somehow, he didn’t.

  He puzzled about it for a long time, floating there in the tunnel with the distant light and the isolation.

  The complete isolation, and that was even more puzzling. Had everyone in Soulminder suddenly and irrationally decided to leave? Had his trap somehow become isolated from all the others? Had the techs tried to fix the perceived problem and accidentally dumped everyone from their traps?

  Or, most horrifying of all, had Sommer’s code somehow crashed the system?

  Time ran differently in Soulminder, so he had no idea how long he spent there. Mostly he used the quiet and isolation to run the code through his mind, tracing it line by line, character by character, searching for a flaw or unintended side effect.

  He had tracked through it three times, and was in the middle of a fourth, when he finally figured it out.

  It was therefore no surprise when he noticed that he was moving slowly backward, away from the Light. The Light faded away, and the world seemed to fade in around him.

  He was back.

  The first thing he saw as he blinked his eyes open were that there were three people facing him: Frank Everly, Carolyn Blanchard, and Jessica Sands. Their expressions were all alike, a mix of relief and seriousness.

  The second thing he saw, what he’d deduced he would see, were the walls that surrounded all of them. The very recognizable walls of his own basement.

  He took a deep breath, feeling his lungs and the surrounding muscle and bone cracking a little with the unaccustomed effort. “So,” he said. “The damn thing still works.”

  “Of course the damn thing still works,” Sands said. Her voice was the same mix of emotions he’d already seen on her face. “You build things to last, Adrian. You always have.”

  Sommer nodded, craning his neck to look behind him. A definite trip down memory lane: his first, original prototype Soulminder equipment. Gathering dust for two decades, but still clearly functional, and still programmed with his Mullner trace. All Sands and the others had had to do was turn it on, and he’d come straight here when he escaped from his trap in the main Soulminder system.

  And isolated as it ha
d always been from that system, the prototype hadn’t downloaded his new back-door exit programming. Once it had grabbed him, he’d been there for keeps.

  And now the three most important people in his life were standing in front of him. No doubt expecting an explanation.

  He’d never expected to have to put his reasons into words. Now, he was going to have to.

  He focused on Sands. “You’re angry with me,” he said.

  “I was,” she said evenly. “You cost us a lot of money, Adrian. A lot of money.”

  Sommer winced. “How much?”

  She started to speak, hesitated, then waved a hand. “Doesn’t matter,” she said. “What matters is that your little stunt has shaken confidence in Soulminder. Shaken it big time.”

  Sommer took another deep breath. It was a little easier this time. “I know,” he said. “I’m sorry. I know what the money means to you and your research. But Soulminder had a purpose once. A noble purpose. That purpose has slowly been polluted and twisted. This was the only way I could think of to bring it back.” He looked at Blanchard. “It has been brought back, hasn’t it?”

  “The understatement of the month,” Blanchard said dryly. “Walkabout USA and the rest of the body-sharing companies are as good as dead, either straight-up closed down or teetering on the edge of bankruptcy.”

  “Those private and highly suspect wings of certain nations’ Soulminder facilities are also emptying out,” Everly added. “We’re already in negotiation with a couple of those governments to bring those wings back under the local office’s control.” He pursed his lips. “The downside, of course, is that things like the Professional Witness program are also on the edge. We may lose some of them completely.”

  “I know, and that one I’m sorry about,” Sommer apologized. “It’s done a lot to bring murderers to justice. But it had to be done. Soulminder was meant to be a medical safety net. No less, but certainly no more. I needed to bring it back to that mission. It sounds like it’s at least on its way.”

  “Assuming that public confidence doesn’t drop so low that everyone completely abandons us,” Sands warned. “You lose twenty thousand people in the space of a couple of months and people start to get really nervous.”

  Sommer felt his mouth drop open. “Twenty thousand?” he echoed in disbelief. For a horrifying moment he was back in the trap, tracking painstakingly through his code and trying to find a flaw in the work. Had he indeed screwed something up? “How in the world did we lose—no. We couldn’t have. How did—?”

  “Easy, Adrian,” Sands soothed, a hint of gallows humor peeking through. “You give yourself a heart attack and you’ll just go back inside that thing. Of course we didn’t lose twenty thousand people. Not real people, anyway.” She jerked a thumb at Blanchard. “You can blame Little Miss Psycho for this one.”

  Blanchard winced, her face reddening. “It—well, it wasn’t hard to figure out what you were up to, Dr. Sommer,” she said hesitantly. “Your talks with Frank and me … Anyway, when we saw that the political prisoners and a few others were leaving their traps, we decided to give the process a little nudge.”

  “We?” Everly murmured. “It was your idea.”

  “You signed off on it,” Blanchard countered. Her eyes flicked to Sands. “Both of you did. Anyway, we just generated twenty thousand ghost occupants—that’s probably not the best way of putting that, is it?—twenty thousand fake client names. And then while we were putting your body back together we systematically dumped them.”

  Sommer felt his eyes go wide. “You did what?”

  Blanchard sighed. “Small disasters don’t catch the public eye anymore,” she said, an odd sadness in her voice. “Even several hundred deaths don’t hold anyone’s attention for more than a couple of weeks. We had to make it bigger—terrifyingly bigger—if we were going to get the results you wanted.”

  “So like she said, we invented twenty thousand new names and then dumped them,” Everly said. “Thereby making it look like over six percent of Soulminder’s clients had suddenly been lost.” He waved a hand. “You wanted Walkabout and Everlasting Torture, Incorporated, out of business? They’re gone.”

  Sommer looked at Sands. “And you agreed to this,” he said, just to be sure. “Knowing that our finances would take an enormous hit, you still agreed.”

  She smiled faintly, a bittersweet expression. “I told you once, Adrian, that you were the symbol of Soulminder. But you were more than that. You were also its heart and conscience. I’ve always trusted that you knew what was best. I have to trust that you were right this time, too.”

  “Thank you,” Sommer said quietly. “But I can’t come back, Jessica. The world needs to think that I’m dead.”

  “Of course it does,” Sands said. “Your death hit people hard, even harder than those twenty thousand fake deaths we created. If you really want this change, you have to stay dead.”

  Sommer stared at her, then at Everly, then at Sands, his heartbeat suddenly picking up its pace. Two months ago, when he’d set up the deal with Jacobi, he’d been ready and willing to die. Knowing that his death would bring about a greater good.

  That greater good had now been achieved. But to his surprise, with the world again bright around him, he discovered that his earlier willingness to sacrifice himself was gone.

  He wanted to live.

  But Blanchard was right. If he came back from the dead now, it would all have been for nothing. The world’s fear would subside, and Soulminder would once again become a toy for the rich and a tool for the monsters. Not right away, but it would.

  Sommer was alive. But no one knew it. No one except the three people facing him where he sat, strapped and helpless, in a long-since forgotten resurrection machine.

  And they, too, knew that he had to stay dead.

  With an effort, he found his voice. “You’re right, of course,” he managed. “How do we do it?”

  The solemn faces facing him wrinkled a bit with puzzlement. “Do what?” Sands asked. “You’re already dead. The whole world saw it.”

  “However, and luckily for you,” Everly said, “a former Army sniper named Adam Jacobi is alive and well.”

  Sommer blinked. And then, for the first time, he looked down at the body strapped into the Soulminder machine.

  Everly was right. This body wasn’t his.

  But apparently it was now.

  He looked up again. “What about the body-soul interaction?” he asked. “Jacobi was a murderer, you know.”

  “But not a psychopath or sociopath,” Blanchard assured him. “I went through his profile, very carefully, with the proverbial fine-tooth.”

  “And then she had to sell it to us,” Sands murmured.

  “Right,” Blanchard said. “But it’s all right. Jacobi just killed people for the money. No psychoses, just a talent and an area of expertise and a taste for the good life.”

  “Ergo, as long as we give you a decent allowance, we figure you’ll be all right,” Everly said dryly. “Besides, you know the signs of that sort of thing. You get even a hint that something odd is happening, you give Carolyn a call. She’ll get you straightened out.”

  “In whatever spare time she’ll have from now on,” Sands added. “You’ve left us some big shoes to fill, Adrian. But I think together the three of us can give it a decent shot.”

  “I’m sure you can,” Sommer said. “So. You going to unstrap me, or what?”

  Five minutes later, with the final farewells, hugs, and handshakes behind him, Sommer found himself walking down the street. Walking away from the only life he’d ever known. Walking toward … what?

  He didn’t know. But he was eager to find out.

  And whatever danger might befall him, he could face it with the comforting knowledge that Soulminder would always be there.

  If I should die before I wake …

&
nbsp; ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Timothy Zahn is a New York Times–bestselling science fiction author of more than forty novels, as well as many novellas and short stories. Best known for his contributions to the expanded Star Wars universe of books, including the Thrawn trilogy, Zahn won a 1984 Hugo Award for his novella Cascade Point. He also wrote the Cobra series, the Blackcollar series, the Quadrail series, and the young adult Dragonback series, whose first novel, Dragon and Thief, was an ALA Best Book for Young Adults. Zahn currently resides in Oregon with his family.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this book or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2014 by Timothy Zahn

  Cover design by Amanda DeRosa

  978-1-4976-4618-6

  Published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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