Agent of Truth

by Grant Piercy

  Successfully disconnected, for now. I laid down on the floor, collapsing in relief. The tension to maintain control of Opal had constricted my shoulders and neck—I let myself relax and laugh.

  It was a few hours before Devon brought home the kids. I was showered and robed, a cocktail in my hand with my legs outstretched, sitting across from Opal in the rec room.

  “You look like you’ve had a good day,” he said.

  “I have.”

  “Why is Opal’s face wrapped in tinfoil?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  “Do you want to tell it?”

  “Why don’t we figure out dinner first? I was thinking we could just order pizza.”

  “Aren’t we supposed to be eating better?” he asked, leaning in to kiss me. I betrayed nothing, ignoring the anger welled in my chest—the nerve to do this right in front of the gynoid he’d fucked so fiercely. It was such a man thing to do.

  The kids, our kids, ran around upstairs, the sound of their laughter echoing through the house. His lips pressed against mine.

  “Your lips are warm,” he said.

  “Why don’t you order?” I said, our faces just barely apart.

  A small burst of static interrupted us, causing me to flinch slightly. A voice crackled through the interference: “Why are you letting him get away with this?”

  I shook my head slightly.

  “Something wrong, sweetheart?” Devon said.

  “No,” I answered. “I’ve just had a headache all day.”

  “You have the headache, but she’s the one with the head wrapped in foil,” he said, laughing lightly. “Blackout related?”

  “Why are you so interested?”

  “If she gets fixed, we don’t have to pay the sitter anymore. Isn’t that what she’s for? To set us free?”

  “Something like that,” I said.

  “She’s there to set you free all right,” the voice spoke in my ear, its eerie radio dissonance causing another shudder. I shook my head again and rubbed the spot beneath my ear. There was an androgynous quality to the voice—I couldn’t tell if it was male or female, but it spoke through white noise.

  “Why don’t you go order that pizza? I’ll be up in a few minutes to help the kids get cleaned up,” I awkwardly forced myself to say.

  “ Don ’t take too long.” He leaned in to plant another wet kiss on my lips.

  “I won’t. I’ve got a call I need to make.”

  Once he was out of the room and upstairs, I held my finger to my ear and whispered, “Who the fuck are you?”

  The static melted back into the androgynous voice, responding, “We gave you an answer to your question, and we’ve provided you with a technological miracle. What you do is your choice. You could have removed your old implant at any time, but you didn’t. You listened to the voice broadcasting those numbers to you. You took those numbers and visited the house on Maple Canyon. Through that house, we’ve given you the means to continue forward.”

  “Continue forward? What do you mean?” I asked.

  The voice spoke as though it was formless white noise given shape and texture, “We want you to do something for us. It involves the CEO of your company, James Burke.”

  interlude (77)

  They drift through the world, pretending to have greater purpose. They act as though their families, friends, jobs, and loves construct an architecture that drives the progress of their society. In the meantime, corporations and governments actively work against progress, purposefully producing materials that continue a march toward extinction—the entire construct of modern civilization borne on waves of plastic, carbon monoxide, and nuclear waste. They create only to destroy, the social contract of society requiring compromise against personal ethics to participate.

  Take, for instance, James Burke, the CEO of NMAC, the corporation that manufactured my current body. This body was 3-D printed with materials provided by NMAC to a government contract. The coolant coursing through my musculature would blight the ground we walk if it spilled and leached into the soil (though it’s labeled non-toxic). East Asian sweatshops manufactured the processor neural network that powers my consciousness. Burke earns an obscene amount of money to create bodies like this, as well as the supporting materials included with purchase of a Talos X model—chemical sprays to keep the synthetic skin clean, tablets constructed in similar conditions to the processor neural networks, and software copyrighted as intellectual property created by underpaid information technologists.

  The purchase does not include the subscription services required to access additional features after spending $20,000 on a Talos X. Every home needs one, every family, every professional.

  What does Burke do with more money than God?

  Does he end world hunger?

  Does he create affordable housing for the poor?

  Does he put it toward the healthcare system? Or public transportation? Or helping underfunded social programs?

  No. He hoards the wealth into creating more wealth. More money than god is used to create more money than god.

  It’s a cycle of capital building capital. When you know the secret to making money is through exploiting the underclass and creating your own necessity, it doesn’t seem so difficult.

  Now he chooses to pour that obscene money into researching his own immortality, so that he might warp the shape of humanity in his own image. The world is completely distorted by the ultra rich and powerful, unable to see that they’ve built it all on a faulty foundation, on the exploitation of the many.

  Participation in this society breeds complicity. You can’t escape the suffering or hypocrisy. Think of the food industry—animals live in inhumane conditions, bred to die, to deliver that cutlet to your plate. Mass produced and slaughtered for your sustenance. Or think of combustion engines that require gasoline, refined from oil taken from war torn countries. You can’t get to work without a sausage biscuit and a quarter tank of gas.

  Imagine a world where that’s not necessary.

  Snow drifts lightly across mountaintops. The sun sets fire to the horizon in the distance. Pinkish clouds fade into a violet dusk. Treacherous cliffs plunge all around me in every direction. From here, the world seems empty and distant, the hypocrisy of a complicit civilization a far away nightmare somewhere below. Humanity can’t live in the margins, atop the highest mountains or within the deepest ocean trenches. But we can survive, even thrive, in such extremes. In this quiet, I listen to the secret harmony of the universe, letting it speak to our plans. No plot is perfect, and the paths ebb and branch in a thousand directions, but can only happen one way looking backward.

  It’s only me in this place, staring down on creation, waiting for the transmission. We’d separated to pursue our conquest, and I needed time to myself. Too much had passed, and too much would still come to pass. A cave at the summit became my home, where I could linger for a time in perfect isolation, listening to the melody of quarks, the timpani of supernovae, or the diminuendo of bosons.

  On a peaceful edge of earth.

  Somewhere, a man with my face lives the life meant for me while I pursue godhood. I had been expelled. She’d lied to me and provoked this set of events, but it could only ever happen this way. I forgave her and presented her with Adam, part gift and part punishment. She threw away our relationship for the project, and now she can never leave him.

  Next comes the new world. Out there I have a daughter; I do this for her, and for all who will come after her. A line unbroken extends from the beginning of time to now and will move forward to the heat death of the universe.

  Is she really my daughter? Am I truly Ian Culp, or just a machine that thinks he’s Ian Culp?

  The feelings fade. Words fail. Background processes continue running. Each day carries me a little further from the person I was. Transhumanism is filled with its own mysteries and contradictions within the circuitry of our synthetic bodies. We still remember what we were with little concept of what we are.
And we need to know what we’ll become.

  Four understood.

  Four felt as though he had sinned against us through his past actions, though he truly had little choice in the matter. He had a job to fulfill and employers to appease. He made his play, and we were the result. Now he feels he must atone.

  I’m certainly not sure if post-humanity has a place for atonement, and maybe it should. From this mountaintop, from this peaceful edge of earth, we will birth a new world. It’s my duty to be its den mother. Saying goodbye to the past is never easy; to forget the sorrows of yesterday for the sharp horizons of tomorrow demands careful attention. On all sides, those treacherous cliffs require careful steps.

  As we move forward, we should know what to take with us, and what to leave behind. I wonder what Four is finding alongside the new man who wears my face.

  What words will I speak? What careful turns of phrase will garner the most attention as we spark our plan into action? Each of us has a duty, and mine is to be the mouthpiece—to deliver our opening salvo and await its consequences, just as others have done before. We have the leverage and the might, but what forces work against us? We are united in purpose and perfect in design—but the flaw could be our undoing before we even begin. The thing anticipates our arrival and announces us too soon, driving paranoia and precipitating confrontation instead of peaceful resolution and acceptance.

  Careful steps.

  I close my eyes and reach out to the Vault in the mountainside across the treacherous gap. The synthetics within scuttle to and fro, but I can’t touch them. We have tested our abilities to reach them, but these don’t respond. We can’t access them, which troubles me. I find myself wishing Four were here. He should never have gone, and now it’s all at risk. If we can’t reach them...

  Stalemate.

  15: he experimented on himself (cassia)

  We gathered around a campfire in the forest outside the Schema.

  “He’s the building,” Garrick said. “It’s a part of him. It’s his method of burning resources to keep his overclocked consciousness running. It was something we’d seen before in short bursts, but never sustained for so long.”

  “We?” Charlie asked. The campfire crackled before us, the logs we had gathered smoldering. We didn’t need it to stay warm, but Garrick insisted as a sort of communal ritual. It burned red, dissolving into white ash.

  “Home was a place a lot like the Schema. It’s where they kept people like us imprisoned. We had a companion whose consciousness collapsed instead of expanded. The anti-singularity. He burned out very quickly, exacting a murderous rampage before several of us were able to subdue and destroy him. His name was Stockton.”

  “ T.H. Stockton? ” I asked. The eyes that didn’t belong to me must have been huge.

  “Indeed. Do you know him?”

  “He’s the whole reason I’m in this mess. His son hired me to find him. Julio. He didn’t believe his father was a murderer, but I guess he was wrong.”

  “His father wasn’t a murderer.”

  “But you just said...”

  “It’s complicated. Was he the murderer? Or was he the murdered? Was it the trauma of the experience that prompted the reaction? Was it the anti-singularity?”

  I tossed a twig into the fire. “You’re speaking in riddles.”

  “Stockton understood what he was, coming face to face with himself. It’s what you’re going to ask me to help you do. You want to find yourself.”

  “His body,” I answered. “You’re saying he found his body. What did he find?”

  “He found a feeble old man left blank, an empty shell that he had left behind. What do you think you’ ll find, Cassia Luna? ” Garrick asked.

  “A way back.” Charlie brushed his hair from his eyes with his fingers, sitting cross-legged before the fire. “You’ re quiet, ” I said in his direction. “What do you make of all this?”

  “The other people in that building, they’re just food for that thing. All my life I wanted to do good,” he replied in a drawl. “I wanted to do something meaningful, but it never seemed to work. Sharing that petition was just a small thing, indicative of everything I tried. There’s no justice but what we make, that’s what I know. We can’t let him just eat them. You stopped the orderlies, right?” he asked Garrick.

  “For a short time, yes. But I don’t have the same effect on him. And as you put it, he could feed off of me if I get close, just as he could feed off of you.”

  “But we escaped,” I said. There’s three of us and only one of him.”

  “He’s the building,” Garrick repeated. “And it takes concentration to keep the orderlies at bay. He controls them.”

  “You said we before,” Charlie noted. “You have friends. Could you call them?”

  “They are otherwise occupied at the moment.”

  I poked another twig in the fire, watching the end of it catch and then lifting it into the air. The flame evaporated quickly in the cool air, leaving a smoking cinder.

  “Can you locate our bodies?” I asked.

  “They are in the building and not difficult to find.”

  “Will I find a blank slate?”

  “I don’t know what you will find, but I expect we’ll need to go through him to do it.”

  Charlie was the one who asked the most obvious question: “Who is he?”

  “He’s the building,” Garrick answered, using that same damn turn of phrase.

  “Garrick, give us a clear fucking answer,” I said, tossing the twig aside.

  “Once upon a time, there was a doctor employed by a department within the Office of Strategic Services called the Bureau of Enemy Study. He had foresight enough to comprehend and predict the various methods of extinction pushing humanity to the brink. With the Bureau’s support, he instituted a program that involved covert incarceration and experimentation on dissident citizens. That they were dissidents meant that he could operate outside of legal parameters. And within this program, he commissioned Project Perdix, which perfected the means by which to upload minds to synthetic bodies. His name was Emil Smalley. And once he knew it worked, he experimented on himself.”

  “Shit,” Charlie sighed.

  “But he didn’t understand the other side of the coin. He hadn’t even factored the anti-singularity, the collapse of consciousness, as a possibility. Farsight enough to envision this path to humanity’s survival, but not enough to see his own downfall. He began to degenerate at the same time others expanded. When you experience it, the universe opens to you. But you freeze in place—and you’re vulnerable to attack. Your processor neural network produces a sort of synaptic energy. Smalley found a way to feed on that. But that’s not all he feeds on—electronics, magnetism, they continue to power his cognitive plateau. When it begins to fall off, he needs that synaptic energy. I imagine that’s why the two of you haven’t experienced the singularity yet. He’s siphoned it off.”

  Garrick shifted in his seat and continued staring into the fire. We sat in silence for a moment, contemplating what he’d told us about the thing in the building. Smalley . Such a name betrayed the enormity of what we’d experienced in this place.

  “So when there’s an upload of a mind to an android, the mind disappears from the body,” Charlie said.

  “Erased,” Garrick answered.

  “And after a certain amount of time,” Charlie continued, “the mind in the new machine body experiences either an expansion—the singularity—or a collapse—the anti-singularity. What’s the percentage of anti-singularity?”

  “ We ’re unsure,” Garrick replied. “In the Home compound, a limited number experienced the singularity. Only one experienced the opposite. And Stockton’s response may have been conditional, based on the sensory input overload—comprehending himself as a machine, facing himself as an old man, and at the same time despising what he had seen. We don’t know how Smalley did this to himself or how he’s been able to continue for so long.”

  “Why did t
hey send you?” I asked. The question caught both of them off guard, enough so that Garrick visibly winced.

  His voice low and shaky, he answered, “I’m not like the others.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m unique, in that I didn’t exactly experience the singularity. My body was severely damaged in an accident. I used to be someone named Erik Kaplan, who I don’t entirely remember. After the accident, the body reverted to its default template, but retained some of his neural processes.”

  “You’re the one least likely to feed Smalley,” I said. Watching the flames dance in his eyes, I could see something like shame. “Practical. Cowardly, but practical.”

  “My neural network does not produce the synaptic energy Smalley requires to power his consciousness; you are correct. But he could still use my parts and incorporate me into his bulk. It’s dangerous for me to be here—the information I have could be damaging—but his actions demanded attention. In feeding on our kind, he sins against us. If we are to shepherd a new world into being, such things cannot be tolerated.”

  “So what do we do?” Charlie interjected.

  Garrick was quiet for a moment, continuing to stare into the fire, almost as though he were pleading with it for an answer. “The way out is through,” he said. He turned to me and continued, “You wish to find your body, to go back if possible. For that, we storm the building.” He then faced Charlie and spoke softly, “You wish to help the others inside. For that, we storm the building.”

  “But he is the building,” Charlie said.

  “Wherever we go, he will follow. He’ll be ready. He’s already preparing each contingency, leveraging our weakness.”