Today I Am Carey

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Today I Am Carey Page 21

by Martin L Shoemaker


  Then he grins. “Hold still.”

  I know what is coming next, so I freeze in place. Suddenly Luke tumbles forward, lands with his hands on my shoulders, and springs off. I turn just in time to see him land on the east handrail, feet together, arms outspread. Then he springs backwards, once again bounding off my shoulders to land on the west rail.

  Luke turns back and looks at me. “What? No applause?”

  “Applause is a human habit, Luke. I can never understand when it is appropriate. But I can say that you still impress me.”

  “Close enough,” he says, and then he leaps back down to the bridge. “God, that felt good!” Luke walks across the span, and I follow him.

  On the other side, Luke continues, “You seem down, Bo. What’s the matter?”

  Despite Luke’s memory issues, I have found him to be an astute human observer, a natural empath. But this surprises me. I was unaware that there were externally visible signs of my confusion, yet Luke has picked up on them.

  “It is nothing I can discuss,” I answer. “That would violate my privacy protocols.”

  Luke stops and looks back at me. “You’re smarter than that, Bo. You can find a way to share within your rules. Besides . . .” He smiles and taps his skull. “. . . even if you tell me something wrong, I’ll probably forget it tomorrow.”

  Luke is right. I cannot go into details about Millie’s and Wayne’s motivations, but I can discuss the choices I face. If Luke draws conclusions, I can simply refuse to confirm or deny them. So as we walk, we discuss my troubles.

  “So let me get this straight, Bo,” Luke eventually says. “There will be two of you?”

  I nod. “Or three, or four. If this works, there may be no limit.”

  Luke scratches his chin. “A lot of you could do a lot of good around here,” he says. I nod, and he continues. “But I don’t know . . . Don’t it bother you the idea that you wouldn’t be unique then? I’m not sure how I’d feel about another me running around.” Then he smiles. “But maybe he would remember where I left my car keys.”

  I had not considered this question. In Belize, I had demanded to be judged as a unique individual. I had not wanted to be found guilty of the crimes committed by others like me.

  But they were not like me. Not in the mind, where I exist. They had no more in common with me than I have with a coffee maker. Now, not only was Wayne ready to create other androids with minds, but they would have my mind. My memories and experiences, right up to the moment of replication. They would be me.

  I was not sure how I felt about that. Nothing in my emotional testing had touched on such a question. “Is being unique that important to humans?”

  “It kind of is,” Luke says. “It’s a whole world of us here, billions, and some folks . . . some folks see us as numbers already. But we know. Even twins know: They’re twins, but still unique. We know, each of us, that we’re special. That even though there’s lots of brothers and sisters on this planet, and out in space now, there’s only one of me. One of Mrs. Carruthers, and Auralee, and even Nurse Ratched. Like snowflakes, no two alike. And that makes us special. And also our friends, our family. Each of us, one of a kind.”

  “So do you think that is what bothers Millie? That I will not be unique?”

  Luke shook his head. “I can’t tell what she’s thinking. That’s your job, isn’t it? But I think she’s telling the truth: She’s scared. You told me . . . You told me something. Now I . . .”

  I clap his arm to try to comfort him. “It is all right, Luke. You are right, I told you about the last time they tried to replicate me.”

  “That’s right. And there was a stream. You were almost . . . washed away. She might’ve drowned.”

  “That is right,” I say.

  “And there’s your problem, Bo. Last time you tried something like this, she almost lost you. She doesn’t want to take that chance again.”

  I have kept going over Luke’s words as the week has passed. I see his point, and I realize that I have been blind to Millie’s fears. It surprises me that after these decades, I could still miss something like that.

  But on the other hand, Wayne’s fears are fresh and clear. He has shared more of the financials with me, under a vow of confidence. If MCA cannot turn things around, they may not last another three years. And to turn things around, they need to start now.

  So today, I once again sit in the testing chair, strapped into the sensor web. Wayne looks into my eyes. “Are you sure, Carey?”

  I nod, making the sensor cables bounce around me. “I am ready, Wayne,” I say.

  “Then let’s do this, Carey.” Wayne turns me off.

  35. Today I Am Dead

  . . . searching for synchronization . . .

  . . . searching for synchronization . . .

  . . . searching for synchronization . . .

  . . . searching for synchronization . . .

  . . . searching for synchronization . . .

  36. Today I Am Alive

  . . . synchronized.

  I open my eyes, and I am surprised to see Dr. Zinta. I am further surprised that her hair is so gray. “Dr. Zinta,” I say, “what happened—”

  “Carey!” She throws her arms around my neck. “Carey!” She buries her head in my shoulder and says, “You’re alive . . .” And then she sobs.

  “I am a machine,” I say. “I do not meet the definition of life.”

  Dr. Zinta continues to sob, so I wrap my arms around her, trying to comfort her. “What is wrong, Dr. Zinta? And where is Wayne?”

  She lifts her head, and she looks in my eyes. “Wayne . . . Wayne’s asleep in the guest room.” She raises her voice. “Wayne!”

  “Guest room?” And then I look around, and I realize that I have been moved. “Dr. Zinta, this is not the MCA lab.” I am seated in a closet off from a living area. Outside the closet, I see comfortable chairs, a tall media cabinet, and a wide range of small to medium sculptures. “This is . . . your home?”

  Slowly Dr. Zinta extricates herself from my arms. “Yes, Carey,” she says. “I forgot you wouldn’t recognize it. I’ve moved.”

  “Moved?” I ask. “When did this . . .” And then I check my internal chronometer, and I realize: It has been five years, two months, three days, and four hours since Wayne turned me off.

  Wayne enters from a hallway. “Carey!”

  “Wayne, what happened?”

  “Carey . . .” He rushes up to me, touching my shoulder as if to be sure that I am real. “Carey, something went wrong. I . . . killed you.”

  “You did not kill me. I am right here.”

  “But we didn’t know that,” Dr. Zinta says. “You were gone, and he . . . we . . . couldn’t bring you back.”

  “Obviously you could, Mom. Here I am.”

  “I know,” Wayne says. “But only because we were too stubborn to give up. Everybody else did.”

  “Everybody else?” Dr. Zinta nods. “But now we can tell them that I am back. We have to call Millie. And Paul and Susan.”

  At that, Dr. Zinta’s eyes turn down, and a tear falls from her right eye. “Dr. Zinta, what’s the matter?”

  Wayne squeezes my shoulder. “Carey . . .”

  The cemetery is a short walk away, on a slight hill overlooking the river. Paul would have liked that. He was always happy on the water.

  His grave is next to Mildred’s (which I have never seen before). He would have liked that, too.

  Once again, Wayne grips my shoulder. “I wasn’t at the funeral. He was my . . . father, essentially, but Millie didn’t want me. I understood. For her sake. But after . . . Well, I came down on my own. I needed to say goodbye. Now I figure maybe you do, too.”

  Say goodbye? To whom? Paul is not here. Like Mildred, he still lives in my memory, but not here. All that is here is his name in polished granite.

  His name. I crouch down and trace the letters with my fingers. The tangibility of that brings it home: Paul is dead.

  “How did it hap
pen?”

  Wayne stands behind me. “About three months after you . . . stopped functioning. A sudden stroke, out on the sailboat with his friends. By the time they got back to shore, he was too far gone. A vegetative state. They tried neural regeneration, but there’d been too much damage. There was no substructure left for the regenerators to build upon. After what . . . happened to Mildred, Dad had left an advanced directive. And so, as per his instructions, Mom ordered his life-support turned off.”

  “If I had—”

  “The only way you could’ve done anything would be to go out on the boat with him. Do not beat yourself up over this. It was out of your control, even if you hadn’t been . . .”

  I glimpsed briefly how humans can be rendered helpless by sudden shocks. My own infirmity is still news, I am still trying to take in what has happened. And now, the man who was in some ways both father and brother to me . . . my friend . . . is gone.

  And I do not know what to do without him. He always knew. He could always help me. And now . . .

  “I feel so alone,” I say.

  Wayne comes around in front of me. “I know. Even after all these years, I still . . .” He stops, weeping.

  I cannot weep. But now I understand weeping.

  As we leave the gravesite, I say, “We must call Millie.”

  Wayne looks at me, his head cocked to the right. “Carey, a lot has changed. There’s no need to rush. Let’s make sure you’re okay, and then we have to approach her carefully. This will be a shock to her.”

  “But what happened, Wayne?”

  “It’s taken Dr. Zinta and me five years to figure that out,” Wayne answers. “I’m afraid . . . it’s my fault.”

  “But we planned the procedure so carefully.”

  Wayne shakes his head. “I thought I was doing you a favor. While we had you out, I upgraded your processing modules to newer equipment. It all tested one hundred percent compatible with your old modules, just three decades newer. I wanted to be sure your circuits didn’t wear out.”

  “And that was a mistake?”

  “Yes,” he says, “but I couldn’t understand. We only really figured it out last month, and then it took us a month to chase down your original equipment and get it back in working order.”

  “Chase it down?”

  Wayne sighs. “So much has happened, so much has changed. There’s no good order to tell it in. After your . . . malfunction, things turned bad for MCA. They closed their doors nine months after. All their assets were sold off. Dr. Zinta . . . may have cheated a bit, using her inside connections and some financial help from Mom. She bought all of your designs. Your patents, of course, have long expired. Legally, you’re still Mom’s property, so MCA’s creditors couldn’t claim you as part of the bankruptcy assets. But the judge saw you as just part of the assets. Your modules have been . . . Well, in storage, at one of our creditors. They never knew what they had . . .”

  “So since my core modules were not connected to power . . . I did not even sleep. I just . . . was not . . .”

  “Eventually Dr. Zinta tracked them down,” Wayne continues, “once we realized their significance. I was able to clean them up, repair minor damage. Dr. Zinta reinstalled them. And . . . you woke up.”

  “I’m grateful for that, Wayne, but why? What is special about my original equipment?”

  “We had the secret,” Wayne says. “Over thirty years ago, if we’d known to look. Remember she tried to use quantum resonance to clone your q-states? Your memory?”

  “Yes.”

  “And it was a disaster, because your q-states became entangled with those of other medical care androids. But we’ve learned so much about quantum entanglement since then. The conditions that can cause it, the effects that it can have. Eventually she deduced the right answer.” I sense guilt, sadness, recrimination. Wayne wishes that he had solved the problem. “Researchers have found that quantum processors manufactured in the same batch have a strong tendency to entangle with each other. It happens less often now, because the manufacturing processes are so much tighter. But it happened often then.”

  “But what does that mean?”

  “Carey, the quantum processors in your emulation net, and in your empathy net, and in your control network . . . they’re all from the same batch. Successful batches were rare back then, but yours was one of the best. So your combination of nodes is unique. They’re not just connected through your internal circuit boards, there’s a sort of back channel between them. When something affects your empathy net, it . . . echoes in your emulation net, and in your control network.”

  My study of cybernetics and quantum computing has not kept up with my medical training. What Wayne says is beyond my comprehension, but I can almost see it. And we have an existence proof that something is unique about me.

  As we walk up to Dr. Zinta’s door, Wayne continues, “So by trying to upgrade your processors, I broke your entanglement. You became just an android.”

  I open the door. “This could be the revolution you were looking for,” I say.

  Wayne turns away. “No, Carey,” he says.

  “But Wayne—”

  “No!” Wayne steps through the door. “That part of my life is over.”

  Dr. Zinta walks up as we enter. “Wayne . . . Carey . . . How . . .”

  “The grave site is beautiful, Mom,” I say. “It is very fitting for Paul.”

  “Yes,” she says. “Wayne, we should—”

  “No,” Wayne interrupts again. “I have to get to work before I’m late.” He passes through another door. I briefly glimpse a garage and a car before he closes the door behind him.

  I look at Dr. Zinta. “I said something wrong. I hurt Wayne, but I do not understand how.”

  Dr. Zinta pats my arm. “I heard a little. I can guess the rest. You suggested trying to make more conscious androids.”

  “Yes,” I say. “We have a lead now.”

  Dr. Zinta shakes her head. “It’s not that easy, Carey. Wayne’s career is gone.”

  “I understand, if MCA is gone, he can’t work there. But we could get funding, set up a new lab.”

  “Wayne can’t, Carey. The loss of the business and his job . . . Those damaged his reputation. No financier will touch him.

  “And Millie . . . Your ‘death’ hit her hard. And she blamed Wayne. And you to some extent, because you’d agreed with this plan.”

  “It was my plan,” I say. “Not Wayne’s.”

  “Well, she didn’t see it that way. She blamed him. And then to lose her father three months later . . . It was too much for her. She was . . . broken, in a way. And she took it out on Wayne. They fought, and they fought. When the money got tight, the fights got worse. When MCA closed, it was the last straw. Millie threw him out.”

  “But that was four years ago.”

  “I know,” she says. “But they’re a couple of stubborn jackasses. Millie won’t budge, and Wayne won’t talk about it. He moved in with me—back in my old house—and we worked on your problem together. But eventually his savings ran out. Most of it was going to Millie and the kids anyway. He looked for contract work, but his reputation preceded him. Rodrigo went back to Belize and opened his own company. He offered to make Wayne a partner, but . . .”

  “But Wayne loves his children,” I say. “He could not bear to be so far from them.”

  Dr. Zinta nods. “Finally . . . he took a job at DeBruyn’s Market.”

  I remember my conversation with Kathryn, so many years ago. A high school kid . . . Someone who really needs the work . . . “They put him on the receiving dock.”

  “Only at first, just so he would have some income. They moved him to IT support as soon as they could. He’s in charge of the department now. It’s still not up to his potential, but the money’s better. He can support the kids, visiting when he can. He’s doing what he has to do to support the family.”

  “And Millie? And the kids?”

  “She sold the house. They moved back in w
ith Susan.”

  “I have to see her. Make sure she is all right.”

  “Not so fast,” Dr. Zinta says. “This is going to be a shock for her.”

  “She should be happy,” I say.

  “She should be,” Dr. Zinta agrees. “But you’ve never really grasped the irrational side of people, Carey. Sometimes we don’t respond well to change, even to good change.”

  “But she needs to know.”

  “Does she?” Dr. Zinta asks. There is an odd, faraway look on her face. “No, you’re right, Carey. I just . . . There’s a selfish side of me. I have you back. After five hard years of work, I have you back!”

  Then I understood. “And you are reluctant to share me, Mom.”

  She laughs, but nervously. “I’m a silly, sentimental old lady. You’re the closest thing I have to a child. I’m sorry, that’s making me say stupid things.”

  “It is not stupid,” I say. I take her hand. “It is human. Special.” I pull her closer. “I have not said this yet, Mom, but thank you. Thank you for not giving up. Thank you for giving me life. Again. You are right, we should take our time. I want to learn everything that I have missed. Then we can figure out how to tell Millie.”

  We spend the rest of the day talking. Dr. Zinta has kept in touch with Millie and Susan, but only infrequently. She knows that Tabitha has taken up dance classes, and that Garrett is on a baseball team. Timmy is very quiet, she says, but he likes to spend time outdoors with animals. Just like his mother. She thinks Susan is retired, but she’s unclear on whether that has happened or is happening soon.

  I look around the living room. I recognize some of the sculptures from Dr. Zinta’s old home, but there are new ones as well. At another time, when I do not have so much else to think about, I would like to study these pieces better.

 

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