“That’s impressive,”
“It is, Mister Kade.”
“You want a lab rat,” I said.
“In a manner of speaking.” He nodded. “We want to make Agents. We want to build Imprints we can use in Agents.”
“Unlimited skills for sociopaths,” I snorted. “I’m just filled with anticipation when I think of something like that. Wait a minute, maybe that’s something else…anxiety, distress? Are you frigging crazy?”
“This is why we need you, mister Kade. We don’t want to build sociopaths. We want to build complete personalities to fit any situation. We want them to have the skill set to do whatever job needs to be done, and most of all, we need to be able to return the originals back to their bodies after the job is done.”
“And what’s that got to do with me?”
“Mister Kade, you have decades of experience. You’ve done things in those ninety years that would allow almost any personality to be built around it. Mister Kade, we want your mind.”
“You gotta be kidding me. I’m going to get some pudding.”
“Just hear me out.” He held out a placating hand.
I eased back into the seat again.
“What I’m offering you is immortality. I’m not talking about removing your brain. Let me tell you about the next step in the program we took.”
“Go ahead.”
“We started building personalities but none of them were anything more than surface constructs. The mind is much too complicated to just build from nothing. We were almost to the point of shutting the endeavor down and just proceeding with the Education Imprint Program. A couple of us developed a theory, and it has proven itself, up to a point. Several volunteers had their minds Imprinted to the databanks. We used those minds as templates for the personalities. I say, up to a point…because they all went insane,” he admitted. “First the minds and then the templates.”
“That fills me with all sorts of anticipation…nope, nope. Anxiety again.”
“The problem, Mister Kade, is that all of the volunteers were young, healthy and couldn’t take the loss of their bodies. In theory.”
“So you want to copy a mind of some old goat who is tired of his body.”
“Not just that, Sir.” He frowned. “I have seen both your medical files and your psyche eval. I know what you’ve been told, and I know what you’ve let them see about your mental state. I’m pretty sure no one has seen what your mental state truly is, except yourself.”
I grunted. I guess the secret wasn’t really a secret.
“I know that your body is failing. And worse, it is just a matter of time until it starts to affect your mind.”
“Yeah, those moments I told you about are all that more precious, now.”
“I can imagine.” He scooted his chair back and stood up, facing the window. “Will you, at least, come and look at the program?”
“I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” I said. “I’m going to go eat some pudding. Then, if you’ll help me do something, I’ll go with you and look this thing over.”
“What can I help with?”
“You help me steal that car.”
He looked at the car with a grin, “Done.”
“And one more thing,” I said.
“What’s that?”
“Drop this off at the front desk.”
I pulled Carl’s wallet from the pocket of my robe and placed it on the table.
Bern raised his left eyebrow.
“Made me walk all the way across the place.” I shrugged.
He chuckled. “Done.”
It was almost half an hour later when I eased into the driver seat of the Camaro. I grunted as I reached under the seat, looking for a spare key. Always check before trying to hotwire a car. A lot of folks just throw the keys under the seat out of sight. Something jingled, and I raised my head to see Bern holding a set of keys.
My eyes narrowed. “Your car?”
“No, Sir, Mister Kade, yours. It would be a shame to damage the steering column.”
“No doubt,” I said and took the offered keys.
The engine rumbled with power, and I smiled. Immortality? Hmmm.
* * *
“This place looks well-guarded,” I said as the Camaro rumbled into the drive of a military compound.
“It is,” Bern returned. “The guards don’t even know what they’re guarding.”
“There’s plenty of them.” I pointed to our left. “Looks like seven posts on the left, four on the right. Then the two guys in the shack.”
“Pretty good, Mister Kade. There are six on the right.”
“Damn these old eyes,” I muttered.
“Pretty good for an old man, Mister Kade,” he said. “Stop at the gate.”
I stopped at the gatehouse and watched the two guards approach the car from each side.
“Doctor Bern,” the guy on the left nodded. “Who is this?”
“If you’ll look on the orders in the shack, you’ll see I am expected with company.”
He grinned. “I did, Doc. Didn’t really expect someone so…”
“Old.” I chuckled.
“Yeah,” he said. “Most of the folks coming in here are a bit more spry.”
“I used to be, Sarge.”
He smiled as I commented on his rank. “You served?”
“Back when the DU was causing a ruckus. Took some shrapnel to the hip back in forty-two.”
“Those were rough years, Sir,” he said.
“Don’t call me Sir, I worked for a living.”
“You’re still around after all that,” he said. “I’ll stick with Sir.”
“Guess I’ll live with it as long as you don’t start thinking I was a lieutenant or something.”
“Staff?”
“Gunny,” I answered.
“Maybe I should salute.” He grinned.
“Been civilian for a long time,” I said with a laugh. “I don’t think they’ll let me re-enlist.”
He smiled and waved us through.
“You’ve been re-enlisted since we left the vets home,” Bern said.
“I’ll be damned,” I said. “Obsidian must be pretty desperate if they’re re-enlisting ninety-year-old gunnery sergeants.”
“This is the Hail Mary, Mister Kade,” he returned. “If this doesn’t work, we’re back to enlisting sociopaths. I, for one, would like to change that.”
“I guess we’ll see,” I said.
“You’re on board?”
“Really, what have I got to lose?” I shrugged as he motioned toward a parking spot near the smallest of the clustered buildings on the base. “Six weeks of hell as my mind begins to go?”
“The report says you have a year and a half before the effects are seen in your mind.”
“It says six weeks to a year and a half.”
“You may have more time…”
“Expect the worst, Doc. You’ll never be disappointed.”
“That’s a pretty bad outlook, Mister Kade.”
“I am almost never disappointed, Doc. Disappointment will eat at your soul.”
He chuckled. “Alright, then.”
I brushed my hand across the top of the magnificent car as we headed toward the door to the small building. My walker kept us moving at a pretty slow pace.
“Welcome,” Bern said as he motioned me inside.
There were three checkpoints along the hallway that made its way around the perimeter of the building before turning in to end at an elevator. The walls were reinforced steel with the standard concrete on the exterior that hid what was inside.
“Hard place to get into.”
“It needs to be,” he said. “This is the future. What we do here could end the wars. Not the war. The wars.”
“You have a lot of faith in this system of yours.”
“There’s nothing wrong with the system. The hardware is flawless, Mister Kade.” He tapped his head. “It’s the wetware that seems to be the problem.”
“Good luck,” I said pointing at my own head. “The noodle you’re about to try hasn’t ever been considered flawless.”
“I think you may surprise yourself,” he said.
“Whatever.”
I stopped and leaned on my walker. This had been the furthest I had walked in some time.
Bern pushed a button, and the elevator opened. Inside was a pretty redhead with a wheelchair.
“Oh, my stars and garters, that’s the most beautiful thing I’ve seen in years,” I said and sat down in the chair. “You’re not too bad, either, Miss.”
She chuckled. “I thought you might appreciate getting off of your feet, Mister Kade.”
“I most certainly do.” I turned to Bern. “Let’s get this show on the road, Doc.”
“Just like that?” he asked. “You’re all in?”
“Hell, Doc, I was all in the second we got in the car,” I said. “Like I said before, what have I got to lose?”
* * *
There was nothing. I would have smiled but there wasn’t a mouth for me to use. I could understand why the others had gone nuts. But there was one huge difference, the pain was gone. I hadn’t even realized how much there was until it was gone.
Perceiving something in the distance, or what seemed like a distance, I moved toward it. It was disconcerting as the light that had seemed so far away a moment ago was right there. It was a door.
I walked through the bright white opening into a room. It wasn’t an impressive room, just a simple round room with a table and two chairs. Walking toward the table, I realized I had a body in this room. There were none of the normal inputs you would have, though, except the visual. The virtual body moved with the same mental commands as the real body. It seemed to follow the same rules.
“Mister Kade?”
The voice came from everywhere and was just a bit disturbing.
“I’m here, Doc.”
“Unexpected, but a good sign.”
“Unexpected?”
“I hadn’t connected you to the room yet,” he said. “How did you find it?”
“Saw a light and moved toward it,” I said. “Then walked through the door into this…round room.”
“Interesting,” he said. “Can you remember everything?”
“I think so,” I answered. “How would I know if I don’t remember something?”
“True,” he said. “Let’s go through a few questions.”
“Sure.”
“What is the most important memory you can think of?”
“That’s easy enough,” I answered. “Elena.”
“And what memory is that?”
“Doc, that’s a whole lot of memories. Thirty-two years of them.”
“Good.”
“How about more recent memories?” he asked. “Do you remember stealing a car?”
“Which time?”
“We’ll discount the last one since it was my car and was more of a gift.”
“There were a couple of times even without that one. I stole my first car after Elena died. I used the ‘Vette I stole to take her ashes to the ocean. She loved this spot out there where we used to go, and I spread her ashes there on the beach. When I came back, I left a bit of money and a note on the seat of the car. No one figured out who took the car for six hours. I was in better then.” I chuckled. “They noticed the last one within thirty minutes. I blame Ring. He was with me that time so I might as well blame him.”
“Well, it certainly seems to have worked correctly, Mister Kade.”
“I like the pain being gone, Doc,” I said. “Hadn’t realized there was so much of it until it was gone. But it’s real dark in here.”
“I have some programs that I made for the others to make it seem more hospitable. Programs much like this room.”
“Good.”
“There are a few things I would like to do differently with this trial that I didn’t do with the others. This has to work, or our program is over, so I will be giving you administrative access to the programs. This is as much an experiment as the rest of it, but the fact that you found the room without being tethered bodes well for the interface.”
“Okay, Doc,” I said. “Let’s do it.”
“I am inputting a program called Environ. It is a building program that you can use to build an environment around you like this room. It’s a rather large program because of the availability of so many aspects. What I don’t know is how the interface will work for you since you are inside the system. Your access keyword is HJDRFETY. You may change that after you access the program. I’m going to leave you to examine the program for a bit.”
“Alright, Doc.”
I said the key aloud, and a console materialized at one side of the room.
“That was easy enough,” I muttered and walked over to the console.
“Enjoy the program, Mister Kade.”
“Thanks, Doc.”
I searched through the console commands to find settings and found my way to the access key. With a few commands, I had the key changed to something I could easily remember, then I signed out. The console disappeared.
I walked out of the meeting room into the dark, moving away from the bright door.
“Who dat? Who dere?”
The console appeared in front of me again. Then I really dug into the different landscapes.
* * *
“You appear to have been busy, Mister Kade.”
The Doc’s voice came from everywhere again.
“It’s kind of fun,” I said.
“The gardens are quite splendid.”
“Elena loved flowers. She would have loved building something like this.”
“It is beautiful. I was planning to leave you alone for a determined amount of time but we have a small problem.”
“What is it?”
“You seem to have disappeared.”
“I’m right here.”
“No, the other you. He got a little upset when I told him we were going to download his mind so that we could update your consciousness inside the machine. I left him be for a little while to calm down and came back to find him gone.”
“It must be getting worse,” I said. “He knows I’m free of the pain, now. He doesn’t want to send his pain to me.”
“I thought as much, but it might be needed to continue the experiment. We did this with the others, and it made them worse. They began to miss their bodies much more.”
“Doc, I don’t miss it and bombarding me with memories of more pain isn’t going to make me want to go back. Let me think a minute, and I can help find him.”
“Thank you, Mister Kade.”
“Call me Mathew, Doc.”
“One more thing, Mathew,” he said. “He stole a gun.”
“Shit.”
* * *
“He did, indeed, go where you said he would,” Doc said. “We were too late to stop him.”
“He’s gone, then.”
I wasn’t sure how I felt about what my old self had done. I had only spoken with him once since I had been downloaded into the machine. I’m pretty sure Doc was unaware of the conversation we had. He was beginning to lose some of the memories. Our worst fear had started. The cancer had moved into his brain. We had known it would come at some point, but we both hoped it would kill him before it took that. Most people with this form of cancer die well before it reaches the brain.
“How did he do it?”
“I expected him to suicide, Mathew,” he said. “Even after you told me he would not. He went down into the city and found one of the worst sections of town. There, he interrupted a robbery and shot three of them before a fourth managed to shoot him. He lived long enough to shoot the fourth, who is now recovering in a hospital on Grave Street.”
“Tough old bastard,” I said.
“Yes he was. But now we have no back-up if your program doesn’t work.”
“We didn’t have one left in him, either, Doc. The cancer was into his
brain.”
“He never said anything about that.”
“He told me he was losing memories of our past, Doc.”
“Then you expected something like this?”
“Actually, I wasn’t. This place has changed the way I think more than I would like to admit. I can look back and see where I would have expected it, but time in here has changed me.”
“You have been inside longer than any of the other volunteers made it, Mathew. You feel no longing for the physical world?”
“Not so much, Doc.”
“The next experiment will be the one that tells us whether we will succeed or not.”
“And what’s that?”
“You are going outside for a bit, Mathew. Time to stretch your legs.”
“Alright.”
I was…familiar with the theory of being downloaded into a body. It was pretty anticlimactic when it actually happened.
“When are we doing it?”
“It’s done, Mathew,” he said. “The part where we see if the experiment is a success will be when we upload the copy back into the machine and the two merge.”
“That could be interesting.”
“Indeed. Here we go. I will speak again with you after you assimilate.”
“Okay, Doc. Let me have it.”
The memory was as vivid as the memory of building the latest construct in the machine. It was as if I had lived them both, and in a way I guess I did.
* * *
My eyes opened. I felt them this time, and the sensations of the body that I had been missing inside of the machine. There was only a little pain, but the sensations seemed odd to me. I raised my head and looked down.
“Doc?” My voice was much higher pitched, but very soft. A voice I would have enjoyed listening to, once upon a time. “Why do I have boobs?”
I heard a giggle from my left and turned my head to find the red-haired nurse who had met us at the top of the elevator.
“You’ve changed your hair,” I said. “Close to a foot longer.”
“It has been some time since you last saw me, Mister Kade.”
I looked back down at my chest. “I guess it’s Miss Kade.”
She laughed again. “At least you’re a good sport about it. Doctor Bern insists on the first body that one of you are placed into is of the opposite sex. It gets the shock over with.”
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