The Uploaded

by Ferrett Steinmetz

You are mad, I thought, but couldn’t say it. Something in her needed to believe the world was like a bank – you deposited in kindness and got it all back in the end.

  I’d seen Mama Alex. She’d spread kindness.

  She got no reward.

  “I want to,” I said, the words summing up everything – I want to bridge the gulf between the dead and the living. I want Mama Alex’s sacrifice to mean something. I want you not to hurt.

  Yet those three words told her just how much I couldn’t do any of that.

  “Stay with me.” Evangeline turned away from me, clutching herself. “Stay near. I don’t know why your presence is a comfort, but it is.”

  I rested my palm on her ribcage – a promise. “I will.”

  She drifted into sleep.

  Peaches wheeled up nearby. Her wheelchair rocked, spinning in the woods’ soft loam, but her freshly upgraded treads gave her traction.

  Her face was stark with grief.

  “Amichai,” she said – softly enough to not wake Evangeline, but firm. “I need you.”

  I lifted my hand away from Evangeline, feeling both betrayals – betraying Evangeline for stepping away, betraying Peaches for having let her witness such an intimate touch. “Evangeline’s in bad shape.”

  Peaches held her gaze on me, letting me hear myself, and with each passing second the words felt dumber, less defensible.

  And still I refused to take them back.

  Peaches leaned forward, her eyes glimmering with moonlight and unspilled tears. “I… I know she doesn’t want to be alone.” Peaches’ voice was tender as a sunburn. “But I… I can’t spend the night by myself. Not after Mama Alex. I’d normally dance until I forgot, but…”

  She hung her hair down until it brushed her withered thighs.

  “I need someone to spend the night with me, Amichai. And it has to be you.” She swallowed. “No. That’s wrong. I want it to be you. But if you say no, I’ll… I’ll find someone else. He won’t be as good, and he won’t be as kind, but… I’m feeling like when Mama Alex left, she took everything good with her, and if I spend the night staring at the ceiling I’ll find a knife and slit my wrists. And I will find someone to distract me before I get that stupid. I’m hoping, begging, that will be you.

  “So please, Amichai.” She reached out to me, fluidly inviting me to a dance. “Come with me.”

  I remembered all the nights I’d spent aching for her. I wanted to reach back – but Gumdrool had broken my good arm.

  To take Peaches’ hand would have meant stepping away from Evangeline.

  “I want that more than you could ever know.”

  “Then come.”

  “She…” I couldn’t bring myself to say Evangeline’s name, not in front of Peaches, not now. “If she wakes up alone, she’ll find a knife, too. And she’s got no one.”

  Peaches straightened up, tying her hair back into a bun. “Is that how you decide who gets you, Amichai? Whoever needs you most?”

  I had no words.

  “…It’s a good decision.” Each taut word Peaches spoke was like a fist to my gut. “You protect everyone that way, Amichai. Except yourself.”

  She gave me a sarcastic salute, then turned around, wheels churning in the soil. If she’d stormed off, her leaving would have been mercifully quick. Instead, she plowed her way through the muck inch by inch, giving me all the time in the world to regret my decision.

  I lay next to Evangeline, not daring to touch her. I watched Evangeline’s chest rise and fall in the night, staying awake, making sure I would be there if she needed me.

  My shoulder ached. I imagined what Peaches was doing. Imagined it with every boy I’d seen in the camp: every kiss, every soft gasp, every touch. And in the crux of that moment, entwined with some new lover, Peaches would moan and forget about her legs, forget about Wickliffe, forget about Mama Alex…

  …forget about me.

  I lay next to Evangeline, and not one person in the world knew I was there.

  47: LOST IN THE MOTHER MENTOR’S LOVING THOUGHTS

  * * *

  I held the Mother Mentor’s black plastic crown over my head. “Are you sure this is a good idea?”

  Dare and Izzy kept their distance, as if it might explode at any moment.

  “We’ve eye- eye!-isolated the mmmmindslaver hardware and removed it,” Wickcleft assured me. “The buh- beast is defanged.”

  That technology touching my temples still squicked me out. “You realize I’d feel much more comfortable with this if you weren’t glitch-stammering when you said spoke.”

  “Huh- huh- had to choose between retaining intact verbal centers or my muh- muh- moral structures,” Wickcleft shot back. “Buh- buh- besides, with Mmmmama Alex gone, whuh- we’ve lost our best technician. Call this uh- uh- a necessary risk. If whuh- whuh- we can make you as good at hacking as Gumdrool was at fie- fie- fighting, then we’ve guh- got a monster on our hands.”

  I grinned. “I like being a monster.”

  “So put it on.”

  I lowered the Mother Mentor onto my head. Little servos gripped my skull. The world vanished, replaced with a mosaic of tiny screens. I felt embraced by a helpful presence, one eager as a dog to please. I thought oh, that help screen looks interesting and the help screen zoomed up eagerly to meet me–

  Crap, we’re still gesturing at computers, Amichai, Peaches had said. Why doesn’t your earputer read your mind?

  I wondered what it knew about the Upterlife; tutorials spun out before I finished the thought, starting with childish explanations of the communications protocols Mama Alex had taught me. Each tutorial zoomed towards me and shivered for a moment, then obligingly whisked itself away when it became apparent I understood it already. More tutorials zipped into view, each increasingly complex, until seventeen tutorials shuddered to a halt – knowledge hovering at the limits of my comprehension.

  How would you break into someone’s consciousness on the Upterlife? I wondered. A friendly helperbot explained how the collective memories of a stored mind were used to generate a unique passkey. In other words, a memory could only be added, changed, or retrieved if someone had access to all your previous memories. The Mother Mentor’s explanation made perfect sense to me: the only person who had access to your information was, by definition, you.

  Breaking in was impossible. Each memory you added made you more unique, made the passkey increasingly impossible to fake.

  So how do people in the Upterlife interface with other stored consciousnesses? I wondered – and tutorials unfolded themselves to demonstrate all the ways one stored consciousness sent requests to another: textstreams, audio files, images, skin-simulators, and of course the subconscious dreamstream used to feed people’s Shrives into each brain for judgment.

  It was like I’d explained it to myself: clear, simple, digestible. I wondered if there was a way to feed a tainted image to someone’s consciousness, to trick it into writing malicious data – and the Mother Mentor taught me all the methods of the visual APIs the Upterlife supported. Wickliffe had ensured images had to be sanitized to match strict inputs before they would be accepted – but maybe the auditory channels were–

  Izzy giggled and took the Mother Mentor off my head. “Having a good time?” she asked.

  My head spun. Those lessons had been like nailing two pieces of wood together and realizing you could use those principles to build a skyscraper. The implications of everything I could do set my mind reeling.

  “That was amazing.” I made a weak grab for the Mentor. “Give it back, I gotta… Wait, why is it so bright out?”

  “It’s noon, Amichai,” Izzy giggled. “You’ve spent four hours in there.”

  Judging from Dare’s vacant stare, the Mother Mentor on his head, and the way his fingers twitched on an imaginary keyboard, time passed differently when you learned at an accelerated rate.

  “Yuh-you just cuh-compressed six weeks of learning into a mmmorning,” Wickcleft said. “Guh- get some air, kid.”<
br />
  “But I–”

  “Don’t hog the Mentor, Amichai.” Izzy cradled the black plastic crown. “All I’ve been thinking is how great it would be to play games with Mom and Dad in the Upterlife these days – and learning to program is the ultimate game, isn’t it?”

  “So you’ve just been watching me for the past four hours?”

  “Not quite.” A broad, wet nose pressed against my neck. “But Therapy’s ready to play with someone new.”

  * * *

  Therapy pranced around the mall, Peaches strapped to her back. I sat in a corner, almost hidden from sight, as everyone in the mall cheered. Peaches’ retinue of smitten helpers had tinkered up a specialized saddle Peaches could tie her legs to, and the first trial run had been a success.

  Peaches clopped around, mock-knighting the rebels and NeoChristians who’d helped her. It was a good tactic; playacting as their leader set her up as the next Mama Alex, and the praise raised spirits.

  Still, my stomach turned sour. She’d spent the night with one of them. At least one of them.

  “Shuh- shuh- she needs to gladhand, you know,” Wickcleft told me, flickering onto a monitor next to me. “Puh-politicking is puh-part of her job. Duh-doesn’t mean she’s stopped caring for you, Amichai.”

  “She hasn’t talked to me since… since that night.”

  “And the NnnneoChristian girl?”

  “Not her, either.” Facundo had convinced his mother Ximena to take Evangeline under her wing. Evangeline had avoided me, instead helping Ximena’s family with whatever task was at hand. She sang prayers so plaintively she threatened to overwhelm their gospel chorus.

  “Thuh-that’s understandable, too,” Wickcleft said. “Whuh-when someone falls off the Guh-God wagon, they-they!-they huh-have to surround themselves with like-like!-likeminded people to get back on again.”

  “But why does she need a skybeard?”

  Wickcleft shrugged. “I nuh-never believed in God, Amichai. I just built one.”

  Therapy started a game of tag with the rebels. They whooped and hollered as Therapy made twenty-foot leaps from floor to floor, a blur of movement. I doubt the geneticists who’d cooked Therapy up had envisioned their pony becoming the queen of Dodge-’Em, but no one managed to touch my girl.

  Peaches clung to Therapy’s mane, determined not to be thrown off.

  “So you found the mindslaver tech,” I said. “What message is your evil twin trying to burn into our brains?”

  Wickcleft polished his monocle.

  “I duh-duh-don’t know,” he finally admitted.

  “How can you not know? He’s you!”

  “He is nuh-nuh-not me!” He massaged his temples in frustration, almost facepalming. “I wouldn’t do any of this! And yuh-yet…I’m muh-muh-missing something, Amichai.”

  “But the message?” I insisted. “That must be obvious, right?”

  “The Buh- Buh- Brain Trust thought it would be a simple order, like OBEY THE DEAD. Buh-but no. They perfected that uh-overt brainwashing a long time ago. What other me wants to do is an insidiously cuh-cuh-complex change, huh-heavily encrypted.

  “And until we fuh-figure out what opinions huh-he’s trying to uh-alter,” Wickcleft continued, “we huh-have to sssstay in hiding! We can’t bring you buh-back from the dead to have you suh-suh-say, ‘Citizens! There is evil stuff in the Mother Mentors! Buh-but we don’t know whuh-what their message is.’”

  “But he is trying to brainwash us.”

  “Buh-buh-brainwash? Nuhnot quite. This is more like a gentle rrrrrinse. He- he!-he’s making subtle changes to people’s minds – very luh-long term…”

  I frowned. “You sound OK with that, though.”

  “Nuh-no! Even suh-subtle manipulation of muh-memories mmmmmakes my gut churn. And it should mmmmake him sick, too!” Wickliffe yanked his tie off, slumped to sit down on a virtual sidewalk. “I spent so much time fighting puh-politicians, Amichai. Do you nuh-know how many whuh-wanted to install backdoor fuh-filters to ensure loyalty? And thuh-that was… it offended me. It wasn’t you in the servers if they altered you. I mean, I wanted my fuh-fuh-father to quit drinking – but if I’d stripped his alcoholism away… well, he wouldn’t have been my fuh-father, don’t you see? You cuh-can’t force puh-people to change.”

  I hadn’t realized how badly I’d needed to hear Wickliffe, any Wickliffe, say those words.

  “So I told China, and the USA, and… and, well, every country. They all wanted to ‘fix’ people. I told them to guh-guh-go hang themselves. Then I muh-made my Upterlife so much better they huh-had to come to me. Thuh- hat’s why I worked twenty-hour days, cuh-constantly making the Up-Up!-Upterlife’s servers the finest. Because if I didn’t, some scuh-scumbag would put puh-parodies up on the internet and call them people.”

  That was all true. That was Wickliffe’s mystique. After the government bureaucrats had uploaded their consciousnesses, they’d defected to reveal what draconian plans their governments had wanted to implement – and as a result, people came to trust Wickliffe more than any set of laws. He’d gotten elected president because he’d safeguarded eternity.

  “So huh-huh-how did I come to betray myself, Amichai?” Wickcleft materialized a bottle of scotch in his hand, gazed at it longingly, then smashed it into the gutter. “That duh-drives me mad.”

  “Would it help distract you if I asked you to help me hack the Upterlife?”

  Wickcleft gave me the indulgent laugh you gave a kid when he said he’d be an astronaut when he grew up.

  “Yuh- you can try. Buh-buh-but I locked those up tight.”

  “Surely the president could…”

  “Nuh-never hand your uh-enemy a weapon you wouldn’t whuh-want used on yourself, Amichai,” Wickleft chided. “I duh-didn’t know I’d become president. I designed the entire suh-system so that no one, and I mean no one, could read your mind. Nuh-not even me. And no one could change your mind unless yuh-you desired it. Thuh-that’s baked in. Once you’re uploaded, yuh-yuh- our memories are your own.”

  “Wait – Wickliffe told me he’d read my Shrive… He predicted what I wanted…”

  “A lie to thuh-throw you off. Wuh-we are just very good at suh-sizing people up. Uh-especially when wwwwwwe can pull up your luh-life’s history.”

  “But surely a security flaw could let me read someone’s…”

  “Nuh- not many left at this point. I’ve puh-puh-patched them all. I vuh-verified every snippet of code before it was chuh-checked in…”

  “So there’s no workaround?”

  “I’d say no, but… yuh-yuh-you do surprise me.” His admiration warmed me. “You have a whuh-way of coming at people from unexpected angles.”

  “I think I can turn this all around. If I can just talk to the dead…”

  Wickcleft steepled his fingers, intrigued. “You think talking will solve this?”

  “Well, it’s all I’m good at.”

  He laughed, invigorated by the challenge. “Vuh-very well, Amichai Damrosch. I will huh-help you hunt for security fuh- fuh- flaws in my programs. I’ll huh-hook up with the Mmmmother Mentors to teach you uh-uh-all my secrets. So you can have a chuh-chat.”

  A tension unknotted in my chest. “Thank you, sir.”

  I looked at Peaches, who’d unstrapped herself from Therapy. Therapy nuzzled her neck, and she laughed in delight… Until she saw me.

  She asked one of her rebel suitors to help her back into her wheelchair, turning away.

  “Whuh-what will you tuh-teach Isabella?”

  It was a crude politician’s distraction. But Wickcleft had reminded me that whatever happened with Peaches, I still had Izzy.

  “Gonna do it the way Mama Alex taught me,” I said. “She’s gonna hack her own internet connection.”

  “Tradition,” Wickcleft murmured. “I lllllike it.”

  48: ACTS OF SUBTLE SABOTAGE

  * * *

  “You broke it,” Wickcleft whispered.

  I sat next to the Brain Trust, starin
g at the testbed software that we’d been battering for… well, I didn’t know how long. You lost track of time in the Mother Mentor. Days. Probably weeks.

  But inside that testbed was a complete working copy of Wickliffe’s Upterlife software, holding every safeguard the Upterlife had to offer. I’d spent days proposing methods to sneak past the various defensive measures, with Wickcleft telling me how that wouldn’t work, that wouldn’t work, that can’t work.

  After assaulting the Upterlife from a thousand different angles, I’d finally found a crack to wriggle through.

  Wickleft’s image flickered across every monitor on the Brain Trust server, doing a looping cha-cha with himself. “You did it!” he cried. “You thought of something I hadn’t!”

  I removed the Shrive helmet and checked the miniUpterlife for the third time. The vulnerability was still there.

  “I did it,” I told him, and Wickcleft echoed “Yes, you did it!” and Dare, distracted, took off his Mother Mentor.

  “You did what?”

  I held out the Upterlife readings to him. If anyone could prove me wrong, it was Dare. With Mama Alex gone, he’d spent twenty-hour days in the Mother Mentor learning how to maintain the Brain Trust. Between that and his architectural superpower, he’d become the enclave’s acknowledged master of Upterlife hardware.

  Dare flicked through the result sets. He checked each indicator off, verifying this wasn’t a false signal.

  He whistled low as he confirmed the exploit.

  “That is a gigantic vulnerability,” Dare said. I drank in his approval. “Now how do we weaponize this glitch?”

  “I’ve got just the ticket.” I turned to Izzy, who muttered to herself beneath a Mother Mentor hood. “Hey, Izzy – look what I did!”

  She didn’t respond. I checked her feeds; she’d finally cracked a connection open to the internet.

  I felt a warm glow of triumph. My sister, who’d once yelled at me for talking to Mama Alex, was now a badass illegal programmer. The moment I’d broken into the Upterlife, she’d cracked her first connection – a wonderfully symmetrical victory.