Idempotency (34 page)

“Walk faster, Dalton,” she demanded.

“My name is . . . it’s Dylan. I’m not—Dalton. What is going on?” Dylan’s head ached.

She laughed. “You can be whoever you want to be, hon. I don’t give a damn. Go through the double doors.”

Dalton looked over her shoulder at his once-dead wife. She motioned him forward. He turned around and opened the doors in front of him. A beam of white light erupted around them as he entered the room beyond. The door shut behind them.

He felt water against his arms. A subtle mist was floating around them. He glanced backward and saw the closed door, standing upright with no support, alone, no walls, no ceiling. The door, his dead wife pointing a stasis inducer at him, and he (whoever
he
might be) stood alone on a sidewalk. A light rain danced around them. The air was chilled, but above freezing and there was no wind. In front of them were steps leading up to the Saint James Cathedral in downtown Seattle. This place was unknown to Dalton, as his deathTrip had ended the moment Sabrina had died.

Sabrina slowly lowered her weapon, then tossed it into the street behind her.

“Have you wondered, Dalton, what happened after I told you how I aborted your children? You wanted children so bad, and I ripped them out of myself with an old, rusty hanger. One little guy’s heart was still beating when I squished his little head—”

Dalton lunged at his wife, wrapping his hands around her throat. He squeezed and she began to gasp, but she didn’t fight. The harder he squeezed, the more insane her smile became. Her body began to shake after sixty seconds. Still, she didn’t fight. Around the two-minute mark, her legs became limp, and then they fell as one onto the wet sidewalk at the base of the stairs; Dalton straddling Sabrina’s limp body.

She spasmed and seemed to make a last-ditch effort to speak. He loosened his grip slightly and she choked out the following words: “You have it backward, sweetie. Dalton is the real person . . . Dylan is the deathTrip.”

Dalton looked upon Sabrina, enmity lining the creases of his face, and he squeezed a final time. The life twitched out of her body.

Dylan brought his hands up to his face and stared at them. He wondered what Kristina would think of him, and he began to cry.

Dalton stared at the corpse beneath him while Dylan simultaneously thought of Kristina.

“Hello, Dalton,” spoke a raspy voice.

Dylan/Dalton—Dylton—looked upward, toward the cathedral. As if he were an angel sent from the heavens, Rev. Edward Lee Coglin materialized at the top step of the cathedral.

“Dalton, my name is Edward Lee Coglin. Do you recognize me?”

Dylton was scrambled, confused, two selves entwined in one. He replied as such: “You . . . you’re an older version of Dalton. An older version of me—of him.”

“That’s right, Dalton, I’m an older version of yourself. Have you ever wondered what happened after the evening Sabrina told you that she murdered our children?”

“I have. He has,” replied Dylton.

“Wonderful, then allow me to show you. I’ll show everything.”

Rev. Coglin wore a comforting smile and held out his hand. Dylton was so confused at this point that he would have accepted help from the devil—which was, more or less, exactly what he was doing.

[[email protected] 11:57:34] OK, Sabrina, put him down.

Behind Dylan, Sabrina shot up from her recumbent position. She pointed her index finger at Dylan and fired a small needle into the back of his neck. Dylan collapsed onto the sidewalk.

Coglin’s holoVid stared at Dylan with sympathy. He looked up at nothing in particular and said, “Keep me posted. As soon as you know anything, I better know it too.”

“Yes, Reverend, I’ll keep you posted.”

Dozens of floors above Dylan, Dr. Kya Okafor sat on an ergonomic standing stool, sick to her stomach, watching a holoVid of the interaction between Dylan and an EarthwideGamingCorp android modeled after Sabrina, the wife from Dylan’s deathTrip.
Rather, the wife in the deathTrip had been modeled after the android, but who’s keeping track?
thought Kya. She absently pulled at her lower lip as she watched intently.

The Sabrina droid stood up, walked over to Dylan, and laid a hand on his forehead. A cornucopia of metrics blazed into holographic life around Dr. Okafor. She soaked up the information, forming quick theories and following up with dozens of further questions. She waved her long, tanned arms madly in front of her, desperate to find more meaningful metrics.

One fact was screaming out through the noise of data: Dylan’s brain was confused. A war was raging between Dylan’s occipital cortex (the portion of the brain activated when using imagination) and his anterior medial prefrontal and posterior cingulated cortices (the areas of the brain that engage when dealing with reality). The data was definitive: Dylan had lost all sense of what was real versus imagined. His mind was now fungible.

Dr. Okafor’s three lab assistants buzzed around her as they readied monitoring and transfer-actuation equipment that surrounded a flat metal table, which was topped with a firm, form-fitting cushion that would soon be the final resting place of Dylan’s contorted body and mind.

Without removing her eyes from the holoVid of Dylan and the Sabrina droid, she asked her assistants, “Are we ready?”

Two different answers came back, neither of which satisfied Kya. With an emphatic zeal, she demanded they find a way to speed up their preparation.

“Well, hurry up, please—Dylan’s mind is ripe for the . . .”

Kya hesitated.

Dr. Okafor hated hesitation.

Fourteen universities had happily accepted Kya into their ranks with full scholarships, no less. A driven individual since childhood, Kya was raised by a single mother who had worked two jobs. Together the pair overcame insurmountable odds. Kya watched as her hero, her mother, slaved away during the days (and often the evenings, too) in jobs that were far below her intellect, simply to give Kya a proper home in a part of town that would ensure she received the best public education. They lived a middle-class lifestyle on lower-class wages. As Kya grew into an awkward teenager, she vowed to live up to her mother’s lofty work ethic and become the first of her family to graduate from university.

High school had been an awkward and lonely time for Kya. Surrounded by far wealthier classmates, social conventions made making friends a challenge. She rode a bicycle home to their apartment, while the other kids took private transports to their parents’ wealthy homes. She brought in a small packed lunch while the other kids purchased large meals. She used antiquated holoTablets while the other kids studied from the BUIs. She was always the odd girl out, the last picked, the most awkward teen.

Where making friends had been tough for Kya, education had always come easy. Becoming valedictorian was trivial compared to the few dances Kya had attended. Scoring perfectly on her half-dozen university placement exams had been on par with her efforts of ensuring proper lunchtime social etiquette. But mastering Bach’s
Goldberg Variations
on the piano? Now
that
had been as challenging as any conversation she had ever had with a boy. Nothing before or since had satiated Kya’s perspicacious mind the way Bach had. Advanced physics had been a cinch—Bach, not so much. Learning machines? Easy-peasy. Bach? Nope.

Kya spent the evenings of her senior year of high school hunched over a piano that looked so decrepit the keys reminded her of uncleaned dentures—but it was the most expensive piano her mother could afford: free. And while it stayed woefully out of tune despite her best efforts, she grew to love every flat and sharp as if they were her own custom musical notes. As her mastery of Bach’s work grew—her fingers fluidly moving across the chipped, faux-ivory keys—so too did her young soul grow, for she had discovered passion.

Kya’s mother could not have been more thrilled, and though a music degree would not ensure riches (likely the opposite), her mom had been steadfast that Kya follow her passion.

Fourteen schools of varying disciplines, ranging from science to artificial intelligence to classical music had received articulate holoVids from Kya, humbly requesting attendance to their esteemed programs. Only one plea had been authentic, however, and it happened to include a perfect rendition of Bach’s seminal harpsichord piece. At the end of the holoVid, as the final note still echoed, Kya apologized for the flats and sharps that only the perfect ears of those reviewing her piece would hear. She noted that while she could have tuned the piano prior to her performance, ensuring that the keys stayed in tune at least through one performance, she felt that a perfectly tuned rendition would not accurately represented her true spirit.

She ended her video by stating: “Because, like this piano, I too have parts of me that are out of tune. And I love those parts just the way they are.”

Somewhere, a pretentious teardrop from a stodgy old professor who had long ago lost passion for music fell upon the Accept button of Kya’s application.

So when the time came to at last choose a university to attend, Kya hadn’t hesitated to choose her most challenging, her most inspiring, and her most passionate path: the Juilliard School for Music. She responded personally to their acceptance holoVid with a Mozart-inspired composition she penned on the spot, titled “Accipio”; Latin for “I accept.”

Two days later, Kya’s mother fell into a coma from a rare disease, robbing her mind of oxygen.

Kya hesitated for the first time.

When Kya had two years invested in her PhD in cognitive neuroscience, her mother passed away. It had happened silently, one inhale too many. One simple breath inward, never to be let out. All of those memories—her mother’s very soul—lost forever. Deleted.

Had Dr. Okafor only finished her PhD a little sooner, worked a little harder, been a little more perfect, perhaps she could have saved her mom . . .

When the job of chief scientific officer of NRS had been offered to her, she had hesitated. The job offered her more clout and pay than any other, so her only trepidation had concerned control. She didn’t work well with barriers. It wasn’t so much that she preferred to draw outside the lines; rather, she preferred to draw the lines themselves. Until NRS, Kya’s previous experience had been exclusively at start-up environments, ten to twenty employees at most. Smaller groups of people could get away with far more, simply because they had less to risk.

So when the lawyers at NanoRegenSoft had presented her with a nondisclosure agreement the size of the Bible, she had hesitated more than a remedial med student would during their first attempt at cauterizing a wound. She had even turned the job down. It wasn’t until Reverend Coglin had paid her an informal visit—promising her the freedom to operate beyond the litigious eyes of public corps—that she had acquiesced and taken the job.

“You will have more freedom than you’ve ever imagined,” Coglin had whispered to her in his most seductive tone. “I will build you a lab the envy of the world over—darkTech or corpTech—anything you desire. You will operate outside of the bounds of the United States; you won’t be required to submit documentation for patent purposes, yet everything you do will receive accreditation upon completion of our project. You will be known the world over for allowing humanity to live on, to live forever.”

The choice was easy.

Now, in her lab, with her rats running around behind her and her holoVids and metrics encompassing her periphery, Kya paused. She was about to load Coglin’s memories, up to the minute, into a deathTrip to be transferred to an innocent man—Dylan Dansby.

She patiently watched a holoVid displaying various metrics pertaining to Dylan’s brain function, it was clear his mind now struggled with reality. Her eyes welled with tears, which she abruptly refused to let fall. She gritted her teeth. She was destroying an innocent man to save humanity.
Was this man’s soul worth the cost of everlasting life for the entire human race?
Of course. It was a bargain, if you really thought about it.

“Hurry up, everyone—Dylan’s mind is ripe for transference.”

Hours later, during one of the more challenging days of Kya’s career, she fielded a contentious holoVid from her boss.

“Mr. Coglin, the average person has seventy thousand thoughts every day. Those thoughts are the product of eighty-six billion neurons, all of which are in constant communication within our brains. Each single neuron connects via synapses to somewhere between five thousand and two hundred thousand other neurons. Each little neuron listens to tens of thousands of messages—yet they send only one message. Fascinating, right? They send that one message fast, though—one hundred and fifty meters per second.”

Kya stood rigid, her hands clamped to a desk, elbows locked.. She stared at a holoVid of Reverend Coglin’s leathery face. Behind her, the body of Dylan Dansby lay motionless. Monitors beeped and buzzed, keeping watch on the careful cartography of a man’s mind. As Dr. Kya Okafor spoke, she took pleasure in watching the corners of Coglin’s lips turn down and his brow furrow. She continued with her enjoyment.

“I’m off topic—back to your initial question. Let’s just round up and say we have about one thought every second. That’s totally inaccurate and not exactly measurable, considering our subconscious, but we’ll go ahead and run with it. So, one thought per second. Given this, our brain requires seven quadrillion synapses to fire in order to produce a single thought. Give or take a few quadrillion.” Kya paused, then turned slowly on her stool to make direct holoVid eye contact with her boss, an angry old man who she had come to call Reverend Grumpy when he wasn’t around. “And you ask me, after not even five minutes, whether I’ve mapped and analyzed the entirety of this man’s constantly evolving brain?”

Kya figured Reverend Cogling was not accustomed to recalcitrant employees, and she watched with pleasure as he gritted his teeth in frustration.

(Thousands of miles away, back in Seattle, the good Reverend yet again regretted hiring Dr. Kya Okafor. She had been the best in her field—no doubt about it—but he had known from her initial psychiatric evaluation that he might have trouble controlling her. He cursed his hubris; it had always been his weak link.)