by Tony Corden
Diary - 15 December, 2073 - Evening
It hurts…
I didn’t say anything, I didn’t make a sound. I did moan a few times, but that’s it.
I suppose everything is a learning experience. I’ve learned that local anaesthetics don’t affect new carbon fibre neural pathways. Gèng tried to control the connection but the pathways are mine now, they’re fully connected. I could feel every cut and every prod. I’m thankful the connections aren’t as comprehensive as my biological nerves, or I don’t think I’d have survived. But, truth be told, I’m not complaining. I heard and saw enough to know that if the carbon fibres hadn’t been there, then I’d be dead. From not being able to react fast enough. From shredded lungs and a shredded heart. From blood loss, if nothing else.
Someone tried to kill me. Meredith tried to kill me. Nathan tried to kill me. All because she lost the upload. I wonder what is so valuable to her. And what do I do now? How am I supposed to respond? If I knew what I was feeling I think I’d know what to do. I mean, I know I was angry earlier, but I don’t know what this feeling is. Why is it that I can get angry for Lillian, for Zarif, for N’den, for Wisp, for Rik, for Catherine, for Thad and even for Mist’s brother Jim who I’ve never met but I don’t feel that same anger for myself anymore?
I used to. I used to get incensed by the injustice, the wrongness of my lot. I was angry at everyone and everything for a while. I think I decided, rightly or wrongly, that only I would control my life. If I didn’t like something, or if I felt I wanted more then I would take control. And, it’s worked for a while, but things are bigger than they were. I’m realising that I can’t, I can’t control my life. I can only control some things, and even those only because I’m surrounded by others. Maybe that’s what I feel, powerless.
Maybe I should back off. Take a step back and leave the Kodomans and Emersons alone. Sink back into my smaller pond where I can control things. But I won’t. For no other reason right now except that I don’t want to be a ‘Coats’, I want to be a ‘Kevin’. I can’t imagine the courage it took for him to face his demons, whatever they are. I know if I step back into only the things I can control then I’ll wither and die. I tried to picture myself thirty years from now, dirty and naked except for two or three old coats that never get washed and the scary thing was I could. I can imagine that giving up on one thing could lead me to give up on everything.
So I guess it’s time to step up and look out. But now it isn’t only a matter of looking further, but it’s also about stepping up and seeing it all the way through to the end. By myself I may be powerless, but Kevin has also shown me—I’m not on my own.
19
December 16, 2073 - Part 1
REAL WORLD
Leah opened her eyes as the Pod cover lifted. Mrs Sperry was waiting with Jen, John’s girlfriend. Mrs Sperry said, “Leah, Lacey and Marie are both still sleeping. Mia’s going to come in and check on you in just a minute. John said you’d need more than just me to help you this time and Jen offered.”
It took both of them to help Leah from the Pod. Once she was out, she explained that she really needed the bathroom and so they helped her to the toilet. Mrs Sperry wanted to stay and support Leah, but Leah made her leave. Leah said to Gèng, “I haven’t needed to go this badly for a long time.”
“You haven’t been since you were shot. Also, I kept you in NREM3 for four hours. Even with most of the nanites retasked to help with the damaged muscles and to reduce swelling, you won’t be up to swinging a sword for at least another four hours, if that.”
“I’ve just missed another day of Dunyanin. I can’t afford any more time away without questions being asked, especially just after the rankings came out.”
After calling for Mrs Sperry, she was helped back into the room where Mia Lee was waiting. Mia checked each of the wounds and redid the dressings. She was pleased with the results and said that Kevin promised he’d drop in after he woke up. Leah needed to eat, so Mia helped her into a bathrobe and Jen went to get some breakfast. In addition to the food, there was a dose of supplements, and an antibiotic Kevin had suggested.
Leah was ready to get back in the Pod when Jen said, “Leah, can we talk for a bit?”
Leah nodded, and the other two seemed to know it was personal and left the room, closing the door.
Jen said, “Leah, I don’t know what to do about John. Since last night he’s been storming around like a madman. He yelled at the security and even had Mrs Sperry searched when she came over this morning. She got up at three in the morning to be here, and he was so rude. She seems OK with it, but I’ve never seen John like this. He’s so angry.”
Leah said, “He’s just being a typical male, Jen. I’m surprised you haven’t worked it out, but maybe it gets harder to see things the closer you get to someone.”
“He’s never been like this before, and he won’t talk about it. You’re closer to him in some ways than I am. Will he talk to you?”
“I doubt it. I’ll tell you what I would do, and if you do it, then he will talk to you and tell you what is wrong.”
“What do I do?”
“In a minute send a message that I want to talk with him. When he comes through the door, start hitting him with my fighting sticks in the cupboard. Just go for it. You’re not good enough to hurt him too much, he’ll deflect a few and then take them off you and ask you why the hell you’re hitting him. Tell him it’s because he’s a stupid, stubborn, pig-headed male whose testosterone levels have dulled his usually average brain cells. When he looks at you without comprehension, tell him it’s not his fault I was shot. After that, you should be able to handle it.”
“I know men can be stupid, but why would he think it was his fault?”
“He’s a male. I think it’s genetic. My mum told me that men blame themselves for what they can’t control, and then take no responsibility for what they can.”
Jen stuck her head out the door and asked Mrs Sperry to let John know Leah needed to see her. Jen took Leah’s fighting sticks and waited near the door. They could both hear when John came running down the corridor. As he walked into the room, Jen did as Leah had suggested. Leah was impressed with Jen’s skills and thought maybe she shouldn’t have recommended Jen just ‘go for it’. When John took the sticks from Jen and demanded to know what was going on, Leah was even more impressed with Jen’s additions to what she had thought was a good insult because Jen turned it into a great insult.
John didn’t answer Jen but turned and looked at Leah. He said, “Was this your idea?”
Leah said, “I have no idea what you’re talking about. I would suggest that discussing it with me before dealing with Jen’s quite appropriate frustration over your behaviour is not the best approach to take.”
As John turned to look at Jen, Leah winked at her. Jen stamped her foot and stormed out of the room. John turned to glare at Leah and then hurried after Jen. Mrs Sperry came in, followed by Mia. Mrs Sperry said, “You gave good advice then, young Leah. Thank you. I was almost ready to beat him up myself.”
After Mia and Mrs Sperry helped Leah with her shower, they helped her back into the Pod. Mrs Sperry had suggested Leah might be better having a rest, but Leah explained that in the Pod her body would be suspended and that her pain levels could be both monitored and moderated.
THE STORK TOWER
As soon as Leah was back in the Tower, she pulled up her notes from the last few days and spent an hour reading over research and looking through the messages she’d missed or put aside. She said, “Gèng, I know I can’t go running all over the place but would it cause any problems if I spent some time in the cyberverse?”
“Your neural system is still in a state of flux, and it also uses a lot of energy in that construct. I’m hesitant for you to put it under more duress. Why do you ask?”
“Well, I finished approving the designs for the coins and reading through the draft proposal from Dunyanin. I glanced through my finances and looked into all the b
uildings Leon is considering, and I thought that next, I’d leave a message for Alan Hopper.”
“I have his contact details.”
“I know but I want him to come to me.”
“How will you get him to do that?”
“Well, your background information said he is a member of the San Luis County Choral Society. I looked at their information site, and they send out regular newsletter updates to their members every Friday at twelve. The deplorable state of this newsletter is a common topic of study on the Society’s forum. One of the people who comments all the time is Alan Hopper. I thought we could ask Reed to slip a small clue into the newsletter that will only mean something to Alan.”
“What type of clue?”
“The newsletters have a small classified section which nobody reads, apparently. Even if they don’t read it, they do comment on it all the time. I thought I’d have a Sophie B. Andrews says she is looking for a second-hand school desk for a grade three student. She needs it because her youngest grandchild’s report from the last term was terrible and she needs the help.”
“His three grandchildren are Sophie, Brook and Andrew. Sophie, the youngest is in grade three at the Cambria Grammar School. So after the hack into the Choral Society, you want Reed to hack into a school?”
“Yes, or we could see if Tesfaye could help, all they need to do is get into her report and add a comment like, ‘Mary Helens really needs the help of Jeff Montrose and his library skills.’ This would be followed by a list of numbers.”
“Mary and Helen are the two people hurt in real life and Jeff Montrose is the hero in his paper. What will the numbers say?”
“A substitution cypher using the public index of his third-party code library which says, ‘Time and location of a meet is in your private highway’.
“You’ll need to drop this message off, and how would you get into his private highway?”
“That’s what I want to check. I think we will find he does have access to the low-security facility you mentioned.”
“Why?”
“The CEO of the real company his story was based on is now the CEO of the parent company which owns the low-security facility. I think he took the job to make sure he had an in. It didn’t make any sense that he worked for that company, so I dug deeper.”
“If you can get in and leave some data, what will you say?”
‘Mozzi’s at ten-thirty’.”
“And Mozzi’s is the oldest saloon in his town, and it has a virtual presence.”
“What do you think?”
“It might work. While we were talking, I asked both Reed and Tesfaye to look for entry points. Tesfaye is part of a hacker collective, and he has sent out an urgent request for some help. When they get back to me, I’ll have to make sure the security storage site will blend into what you’ve already experienced.”
“Is the collective trustworthy?”
“Tesfaye says they are.”
Leah said, “Good. While we wait, I’m going to work on some ideas I had when thinking about aether dimensions and time.”
Gèng disappeared and Leah started working on various equations and running through the assumptions she used when trying to describe a given aether dimension in terms that would explain where and when it might be constructed in our space-time continuum. She’d modelled the situations before and had developed a number of tentative hypotheses on how to describe the connection between points. This time, she incorporated the new data she’d amassed from Dr Ellis and her tentative reflections on time.
She’d been working for almost three hours and was getting a little frustrated. She’d derived a series of expressions which described how a given quantum packet would travel through any given aether dimension. She’d also developed a meromorphic function which correlated the connection between a point in the aether dimension to points in space-time, but she had not been able to unite a single pair.
After her fifteenth attempt to combine the fifth set of specific equations she’d derived, she leaned back and closed her eyes. Either it wasn’t possible, she’d forgotten something, or one of the essential variables was missing. It could also be that her assumptions were faulty. Biting the bullet, she started with her assumptions. Aether dimensions could be constructed which existed outside of the known time-space continuum. Check. There was a connection between an artificial aether connection and the space-time continuum. Check. Quantum packets were not uniform across all aether dimensions. Check. Aether dimensions contained intervals which could be shown to be continuous. Check. Leah’s final list of assumptions numbered forty. She then worked down the list considering if any could be refined, extended, or broken down into multiple assumptions.
Another two hours had passed when on her third time going through the list, Leah realised that she’d subconsciously chosen to investigate only a subset of possible constructed dimensions. A quick check confirmed it, she’d always considered aether dimensions which were both spatially unbound and constructed with a Euclidean framework. She immediately began to list a variety of spatially bound, or shaped dimensions, starting with the regular shapes like a cube, cylinder, or dodecahedron and then a few well known non-regular shapes. Next, she did some reading on non-Euclidean three-dimensional geometries such as hyperbolic geometry and elliptic geometry before looking at those geometries which were constructed in four or more dimensions like those which described a hypersphere or tesseract.
Two hours into this research and just as it had when she’d been working with Dr Ellis, one of the newly formed neurones in her corpus callosum connected a mention of n-dimensional polytopes and something she’d once read when studying thermodynamics. It was about a thought experiment devised by Josiah Gibbs where he considered a closed system in which entropy was allowed to decrease, and there was a mention of a 6N-dimensional hypercylinder. Leah subconsciously increased the rate she received, connected and perceived information.
Gèng immediately noticed the increase but could only observe as Leah’s neural system slowly increased its processing speed to just below its previous best of 43.3 which she’d reached in Dr Ellis’ laboratory. Then, it began to utilise its increased electro-receptivity to co-opt one of the four-dimensional matrix-processors in her PAI chip. Leah’s new, and denser, neural connections didn’t only serve to increase the sensitivity of the chip’s connection to Leah, but they also allowed Leah access to the PAI chip. Leah wasn’t sure what had happened, but she was knew something was different when she began modelling a set of equations for a new shaped-dimension before finishing the model of her previous idea, and somehow she was overseeing both processes simultaneously. She imagined it was due to the new denser material around the connections to her AI chip and almost dismissed what happened Then she realised she was also able to ponder the situation without stopping her data modelling. The processor she’d co-opted had eighty-seven divergent-capable cores, and Leah began modelling multiple geometrical constructs simultaneously. She moved her small notebook to her right hand and started writing notes and then opened her virtual data tablet and began to touch-type her impressions with her left hand. After a minute of this, she also opened a voice-activated memo app and started dictating a third set of notes.
Gèng wasn’t entirely certain she could block Leah’s access to the processor but didn’t have enough information to know if the attempt might be harmful or not to Leah’s newly constructed neurons. She began running a review of research focused on human-controlled computers and contacted Dr Roberts. Leah had co-opted a second processor by the time Dr Roberts responded. Gèng described what was happening and asked if Dr Roberts thought it would be safe to interfere. Leah’s use of the chips had plateaued, so Dr Roberts suggested they monitor the temperature, pressure and neural activity in the brain for a few minutes to get a baseline and then evaluate the need for a possible intervention.
After five minutes, they noticed that as well as an increasing cranial temperature, Leah’s astrocytes were struggling to
both process sufficient glucose and to recycle all of the glutamate produced by her neurons. Dr Roberts said, “She needs to stop soon, and I think it would be best if you try to interrupt her rather than simply stopping her from whatever processing she is doing. She is multitasking and you may even find she can drop her processing speed intentionally.”
Gèng appeared in front of Leah, who stopped dictating and looked up at her while continuing to write and type. Gèng said, “Do you know what you are doing?”
“Somehow, the new architecture allows me to multitask, and I’ve been working through some models for my work with Dr Ellis.”
“You’re only partially correct. You’re accessing my processors and are using them not only to increase your processing speed but also to multi-task.”
Leah didn’t stop her note-taking, but she did reduce the number of models she was working on. She said, “Is this a negative thing and do you recommend I stop?”
“The problem is that your cells are expending energy at a greater rate than they are being supplied and you can’t dissipate heat quickly enough. You need to slow down.”
Leah found she had some control, and as each model was examined and notes made, she didn’t begin a new one. What surprised Gèng and Ellen Roberts was that when Leah’s neural activity slowed, Leah’s connection to the processors didn’t end. Even when her rate of perception returned to its unenhanced speed, Leah continued to make notes with both hands as she talked with Gèng. Once Leah’s cranial temperature returned to normal, and her cells’ capacity to meet demand was restored, Gèng said, “Dr Roberts would like to join us to discuss what is happening.”
“That would be good.”
When Dr Roberts arrived, Leah stopped writing and welcomed her. Leah apologised for not standing but said she’d been asked to restrict her movements.