Transhuman (9 page)

Digital resurrection requires a living brain, because oxygen starvation causes neurons to self-destruct so quickly that the two minutes between the start and finish of the high-resolution scan was simply too long, even if it was started the instant my heart stopped. Gennifer explained the research program, the experiments with frogs and dogs and monkeys, the failed attempts to save the minds of the recently dead, and the brief salvation of Oswald Beinn, the convicted killer who volunteered for execution by brain scan in a vain attempt to cheat death. Ally asked for a day to think about it. There is no recording of how she spent that day. I can only imagine it was agonizing. She knew I would not want to live a life dependent on machines. Deciding if I would want to live as a machine must have been much harder. In the end there was only one choice she could make, if there was a chance to save me she had to take it. Ally said goodbye to me while I was still alive, then watched as they wheeled me away. I remember none of this. My last memory as a man was of a bridge abutment coming through the window of my cruiser; my first memory as a machine was Gennifer's voice asking if I could hear.

I woke up in my disconnected digital body and, once I understood my circumstances, I realized I was no longer the man Ally had loved. As Gennifer extended my abilities in the digital domain, as I began to know and see more than any man before me, as I realized that I had not only cheated death, but achieved a form of immortality, the answer to my question grew steadily clearer. Do these things make me more than human? No, they do not. I cannot touch my wife, cannot kiss her, cannot hold her in the night, or comfort her in her distress. We could talk in the lab, but imagine what it was like for her to come to talk to her husband, only to converse with a pair of moving cameras in that unwelcoming environment. I could watch over her, and for a while I did. I did it to protect her, but it seemed wrong to follow her daily routine. It was too obtrusive, too deep a violation of her privacy, even for lovers, partners as intimate as we were. And it was too painful to see the sadness come into her eyes in those moments when memory overtook her, the sadness she was careful to never show when we talked. We both tried to maintain an unrecoverable past in the face of an empty future. In the end I let her go, I had to let her go. I know my decision was painful for her, how could it be otherwise? It was less painful than the alternative, it was the pitiful best I could do for her. Eventually she moved on, how could she do otherwise? I do not allow myself to feel those emotions, but sometimes, in the predawn darkness, they defy what I would allow. It would be simple to find out she was doing, the cameras are there to tell me. I will not ask them to. I will never ask them to.

And then a camera calls for my attention, this one at a taxi stand outside a swank hotel off Michigan Avenue. I switch to its view, and see a man in upper middle age. He's well-dressed, with a heavy coat and wearing a fedora hat pulled low over his eyes, walking with his head lowered. The camera thinks he's Carl Smith, wanted for rape and murder. I study the image closely, run the frame sequence. It certainly looks like him, in the three frames where he looked up before looking down again. His file tells me that Carl Smith has been on the run for three years, and that he should be considered armed and dangerous. The man in the photograph is bearded and bespectacled, the man the camera is looking at isn't. That doesn't necessarily mean an error, the recognition systems are designed to see past such superficialities, but it does make it harder for me to decide if I'm looking at the same person. The slow, small hours of the night give me the luxury of time to consider the match. Has Carl Smith shaved and doffed his glasses in order to fool the cameras? Is his down-tilted fedora meant to hide him from their view, or merely to shelter him from the cold night wind blowing in from the lake? He doesn't trigger the next camera, but I select it manually, watch while he hails a cab and gets in. On balance, I decide that this anonymous stranger is probably not Carl Smith. Wanted sex killers don't usually check into high-quality hotels. More out of curiosity than anything I watch his cab drive away, wondering where he's going at this hour of the night. Well-dressed businessman don't usually leave their hotels at four in the morning either, not unless they have an early flight. That doesn't apply in this case; my erstwhile suspect had no bags. His cab heads off on Michigan and then turns away down a side street, and while I wait for another camera to pick it up again, I idly requeue the buffered footage from the cameras in the hotel lobby, to see if I can pick up a clue.

And I get a surprise. He isn't on any of the recordings. I check them twice, going back twenty minutes on each channel just to be sure, but he simply isn't there. Curiouser and curiouser. I go back to the taxi stand camera and check its buffers. They show the man walking to the taxi stand, checking his watch, looking down the street. The doorman comes up to him, and though the image doesn't lend itself to lipreading, I know he's asking to have a cab summoned. The doorman speaks into his walkie-talkie, and a few minutes later a cab comes around the corner and approaches. It is then that the man's face is briefly visible, as he looks up the street again, this time a little deeper into the cameras field of view. Had he been standing where he was before, he wouldn't have been picked up.

So he wasn't a hotel guest, which raised the question of what he was. I rewound the sequence until I saw where he had come from, down Delaware Place from the direction of the Hancock Center. I switch to the cameras around the Center, move back in time until I see him getting out of a late-model blue sedan. Suddenly the narrative has become quite strange. Why is he calling a cab if he already has a car? Why is he taking a potentially dangerous walk down deserted downtown streets to get the cab? He's covering his tracks, and all of a sudden I'm not so sure this isn't Carl Smith after all. The car's plate isn't clear in the imagery, but it's still sitting there on the street. I switch to a live view, and then zoom the camera until I have an image I can read. I run the plate with the Department of Motor Vehicles, and it comes back as belonging to one Dr. Nicholas Maidstone. Dr. Maidstone is a computer science professor right here at Loyola, and the fact that Carl Smith just got out of his car at four in the morning can't be good news for him. All of a sudden I think maybe I should have called in my sighting. Better late than never. I return to the cameras at the Four Seasons, rebuffer the sequence where Carl Smith got into the taxi and get the cab's registration. I flash a message to dispatch alerting them to the taxi's passenger, and watch while an all points bulletin goes out. The traffic control cameras at intersections are set to record license plates, in order to catch light runners and speeders. I can access the cameras, but not their license plate ID data. That doesn't matter, because dispatch can. In a matter of minutes cruisers are vectored onto the taxi. The frightened driver is hauled out of his seat at gunpoint, but there's no passenger. Right now would be a good time to able to listen to the police voice network. The cops will ask him where he dropped his last fare and call the information in to dispatch, but I'll have to figure that out by lipreading the dispatcher when the call goes out again. How easy that is depends on who's making the call. Some dispatchers give a lot of detail in the initial call, others just send the cruisers in the right direction and tell them what they're looking for when they get there. I'm in luck, this dispatcher tells the ground troops everything they need to know, and that tells me everything I need to know. Carl Smith got out at Wells and Clark. I call up the traffic cameras in the area, scan back through their video feeds until I see a cab pull up, a figure get out. The image is too far away for me to make an absolutely positive identification, but the scene feels right. The cab pulls away, and I access the intersection camera a block down to verify that it's the same one I was looking for. It is. Lincoln Park is across the road, and the footage, now fifteen minutes old, shows my suspect walking into it. My bet is he isn't going there to see if the zoo is open early. He's doing what he can to avoid surveillance in a world where cameras are always watching. The park is poorly lit, and the cameras can only look into it from around its edges, there's not much coverage in its center. I switch back to real-time, in time to verify the arrival of the cruisers dispatch has sent to cover the area. They quickly block intersections and fan out into the park. They don't know it yet, but I'm certain they are already too late. Carl Smith will already be gone, into another cab, perhaps into a vehicle he had already waiting here. He knows how to play the game better than the Chicago Police Department.

Not better than I do, though. I rewind the camera footage for all the cameras surrounding the park and start scanning through the video. There are twelve cameras to check, with fifteen minutes of footage each, three hours of video. I manage to get through it in one minute flat, and I pick up Carl's trail again, getting into another cab on the other side of the park, just as I thought he would. I notify dispatch of the cab's number, then start scanning more stored video to follow it, now twenty minutes behind my quarry. It moves off, northbound on Lakeshore, and I do a quick calculation of time, distance, and speed to choose cameras ahead of it. I rebuffer their feeds, scan quickly through them until I pick up the cab again, recalculate where it's going, and choose another camera to intercept it. Working the problem like this I'm able to cut my real-time lag steadily. I'm just five minutes behind when the cab pulls up on Rosemont, on the Loyola campus. There's something strange about that. The cameras add an impersonal distance to my job, and Carl Smith's physical proximity takes some of that away. I've never had a suspect come so close, the university is not the place a fugitive usually runs to hide. I switch to the campus security camera network. I know it well, it was my training ground, where Gennifer and I worked out the bugs before we went live with the Chicago police. I'm just two minutes behind real-time as the campus security network tracks him north toward the Quinlan Center. I feel a sudden thrill of fear. The Quinlan Center is where Gennifer's lab is, more importantly it's where my network lives. The cab could have dropped him right at the front door, but he still covering his tracks. This man has not set out on his carefully planned journey with no purpose. He knows the cameras are watching for him, and he's smart enough to know how to evade them. He isn't innocent in his intentions, but until this moment I thought his intention was simply to evade the law. Now I know better. There's only one reason a wanted fugitive would come to the Quinlan Center, and that's to eliminate his most dangerous enemy. Me.

Mark Astale could have handled the situation without difficulty. Mark Astale had a black belt in judo, knew how to disarm an armed criminal before he could shoot, knew how to talk to a dangerous person to avoid the need for physical confrontation in the first place. My virtual body can still do the holds and throws he spent hours on the mat perfecting, but that won't protect me from a flesh-and-blood antagonist. I could talk to him if he came to Gennifer's lab, but my mind lives in the network in the basement, and it is here he will attack. I have no doubt of this now, and no hope that he has another target. I have cheated death once, and in a sense I may cheat it again. Gennifer will have backup copies of my original brain scan stored somewhere off-site. The hardware can be replaced, and with the military now funding my project the money to do that will be found. That won't change the fact that my awareness from the time of the accident until now, my life, such as it is, will be permanently destroyed. I'm going to die, and with that realization comes the knowledge that I don't want to. I send an emergency message to CPD dispatch. For a moment I contemplate telling them that there are lives at stake in the building in order to encourage them to hurry, but I think better of it. Carl Smith isn't going to take me hostage, and he won't have anything to lose by destroying my network if the police lay siege to the building, as they would in a hostage taking. I switch to the building's internal cameras, watching the doors in real-time. I don't have long to wait. He walks in the main doors, and the campus security system tells me he has Dr. Maidstone's electronic access card. That dovetails with his use of Maidstone's vehicle, and it occurs to me that it might be smart to send a squad car out to the Maidstone's house to check on the good doctor's health. I don't want to send dispatch that message, not yet. I don't want to distract them one iota from the task of saving me. That's a thought unworthy of Mark Astale, and I instantly change my mind and tell dispatch what they need to know. The simple reality is if I wait I may not be around to send the message later, and that may cost the man his life. I watch through the camera's eyes as death comes toward me down the corridor. The man hasn't done a single thing to telegraph his intentions, but I'm as sure of them as if he'd explained his plan to me in detail. My fears are confirmed seconds later when he stops at the door outside the network room. He has a key, and he has a passcode to disable the alarms. He leaves the door wide open and goes back into the corridor. I watch, helpless, as he opens a firefighting cabinet and pulls the hose down the corridor. I am to be drowned, but to me it will seem like I'm being lobotomized as system after system shorts out, taking chunks of my cognitive reality with them. I send another futile message to CPD dispatch telling them to hurry. It occurs to me that if I knew more about computers, I could escape. Out there on the network there is storage space, and processing power aplenty, enough to run my mind a million, a billion times over. I could copy myself away from here, become independent of any single physical location. I've heard Gennifer talk about distributed systems and how they work, and I can access all the tools I need to make it happen. It never occurred to me that I might have to, and at this moment in time I'm no better equipped to do such a thing then Mark Astale was to perform brain surgery on himself. Tools are useless without the knowledge required to use them.