by Phoenix Ward
“Actually,” Karl began, stopping Dr. Elfa as she started rising from her seat, “I do have one question. If he can essentially read my mind and I can’t keep secrets from him, does that mean he can’t keep secrets from me?”
For a moment, it seemed like Dr. Elfa didn’t know how to respond. Then, as she gathered her tablet and stood away from the chair, she said, “That remains to be seen.”
The dreams that ebbed in and out of Karl’s unconscious mind were black and too thick to navigate through. It was only a strange, soundless dreamscape devoid of any color or light. All Karl could sense was a cool draft rushing over his body, picking at each individual hair. He couldn’t tell if he was moving through the air, floating in water, or neither. It was almost like his skin had lost circulation and was rapidly waking up.
Suddenly, a radiance sliced through the darkness. With a deafening screech, a doorway was opened, spilling stark light into Karl’s nothingness. He had to shield his eyes at the intense contrast between the black and white. It seemed to take eons for the door to open all the way, but once it had, the screeching ceased.
The silence buzzed around Karl’s ears. He felt a strange combination of fear and curiosity, while also being numb and apathetic. He wanted to see what happened next, but only as a spectator.
A low hiss slithered through the quiet and grew ever stronger in Karl’s head. A light misting of steam seeped out of the doorway like smoke from a dozing dragon’s nostril. Eventually, the cloud became so thick and large that it obscured the opening. After gazing at the thing with unblinking eyes for several minutes, a silhouette appeared behind the haze.
It was hard to tell what the shape belonged to, let alone who. The form took a few steps forward until it was just at the threshold of the door. Karl could make no features out, but he had the distinct feeling that it was staring at him. Staring in him.
Within a few minutes, the steam dissipated, but the silhouette became no clearer. It was almost like the form was just a shadow, a colorless shade that was nothing more than the absence of light.
Karl and the shape stared at each other, allowing the silence to settle with the vanishing vapor. Then the thing took a step forward. As it passed through the threshold, the door slammed shut. The mere motion made the psychologist’s heart leap.
The form disappeared. Like a shadow on a moonless night, it was like it didn’t exist at all—except that Karl could hear it. At first, he thought he was just imagining the sound. Once it became loud and clear, however, he realized it was breathing. The shadow was drawing in breath like a lung had been punctured. Each inhale sounded dry and painful, while each exhale sounded forced and diminished.
Fear couldn’t help but toy with Karl’s heart. His chest tightened, and he could feel large drops of sweat making their way out of his pores. The silhouette hadn’t unnerved him before, but now that he couldn’t see it, his imagination ran wild. He pictured all sorts of nightmarish scenarios unfolding before his eyes.
Finally, he mustered the courage to speak. “Hello?” he said, his voice frail. “Who’s there?”
There was silence for a moment. Then, a reply.
“My name’s Maynard,” the voice answered.
Maynard
Lights flooded into Karl’s eyes, but his mind didn’t react to it. In the same way that a limb requires time to come back to life after anesthetic, the same was true of the psychologist’s brain. It felt like he was trapped inside a paused video frame, and it took a couple dozen minutes for him to realize time was moving forward.
The lamp above him poured a dull blue glow over his face. At first, he thought it was the moon, but it soon became clear that he was indoors. There was a low beeping coming from next to his head, but his neck was far too stiff to turn and look for its source.
For a moment, Karl thought he was going to be sick. It was jarring returning to the world after drifting through a dreamless void. It felt like his entire body had fallen asleep from a lack of circulation.
The walls were eggshell white, but they almost seemed to glow to the psychologist’s drug-filtered eyes. Even in his state of delirium, he knew everything he was feeling was just the result of the anesthetics wearing off. Perhaps a bit of painkillers, too.
“Ah, you’re awake,” a man’s voice greeted him after a minute of blinking. “How’re you feeling?”
“Okay, I guess,” Karl replied. “Still a little loopy.”
“I’ll say,” the voice said. “You look like you’ve attended one too many raves.”
The psychologist gave a generous chuckle in response. He tried to sit straight, but found that his muscles were still waking and didn’t feel like being cooperative.
“I wouldn’t get up if I were you,” the man told Karl. “If you take a tumble and crack your head open, we’re both screwed.”
Karl obliged his companion and rested back into the bed. His vision was coming back to him, evolving slowly from a blurry mess of spinning and distorting shapes to clarity. He blinked a few times and looked around the room.
There were posters along the walls like any clinic observation room might have. There was no curtain, though, for he had the entire room to himself. He was the only patient in the whole facility, after all. A chrome waste bucket gleamed in the illumination of the bright lamp over Karl’s head.
He was alone in the room. The doctor must have stepped out while I wasn’t coherent, Karl mused to himself.
“What doctor?” the same voice that had greeted him spoke. “It’s just been you and me, pal.”
Karl looked all around the room. He even peered over the edge of his bed to see if the doctor was pulling some childish prank on him by hiding. It was a small room. There was nowhere anyone could be. He was all by himself.
These drugs are a bit stronger than I thought, Karl realized. He brought a hand up and rubbed his temples.
“Oh man, you have no idea what’s going on, do you?” the voice asked.
Karl’s eyes shot open wide. He felt like he was going mad.
“Where are you?” he bellowed aloud.
“I’m in here, genius,” the voice answered. “I’m in your brain.”
At that moment, as if on cue, all the memories of the procedure and what he was doing in a hospital room in the first place came rushing back to Karl.
“Yeah, that’s right,” the voice in his head said. “Now you remember.”
You can read my mind? Karl thought.
“Well, I live here, so yeah,” the voice replied. “I’m Maynard—the I.I.”
This is not how I expected this to feel, Karl thought. This is … disorienting.
“You’re the one to talk,” Maynard said, his voice cool and relaxed. “Try being the one inside someone else’s cerebral cortex. What do you imagine it’s like?”
I can’t begin to.
“That’s right,” Maynard retorted. “It’s not exactly like floating in a pool or sitting in a room. ‘Disorienting’ is putting it mildly.”
What do you remember? Karl wanted to know. What’s your first memory of the implantation?
“Just now. You waking up,” the I.I. responded. “I don’t think I’m able to be conscious when you are not, since your brain is what powers my processor. Whenever you fall asleep, so do I. God, that’s inconvenient.”
Do you remember anything from before?
“Of course,” Maynard said. “I remember my entire life. Did you think I wouldn’t? What would be the point of this whole experiment if they implanted a moron into your head?”
So they briefed you on everything? Karl asked. You know about the test?
“They didn’t exactly roofie me and now here I am,” Maynard explained. “I may be bodiless, but I still had to provide consent. This isn’t Sigma Something Beta, or whatever neanderthal frat you belonged to in college.”
Great, Karl thought. I can tell this is going to be a productive relationship.
“Well, if it makes you feel any better, they didn’t ask me who
I wanted to be implanted into, either,” Maynard said. “Otherwise, we might not be in this situation.”
We both signed up for this, Karl commented in his head. The least we could do is try to make the best of it.
“Oh man,” Maynard started. “Once you get to know me, you’ll realize how stupid that statement was.”
First Impressions
Karl found it a bit more difficult than he’d anticipated to retain his sanity while working with Maynard, as the cybernetic engineer was callous and generally uncooperative. In moments of silence when Karl needed to concentrate, Maynard would ramble about something. Whether it was to intentionally mess with him or just a lack of awareness, however, the psychologist could not determine.
There was a little part of Karl that wished his surgeon had mentioned the possibility of being annoyed to death when he was given a post-operation check-up.
“You know, I was working on something just like this,” Maynard commented as Karl looked over the code injections he would working on. “Except that was thirty-one years ago. Has nothing advanced since then? What, was my death the end for mankind’s scientific achievements?”
“We’ve made plenty of progress since then,” Karl said aloud. He preferred to speak directly with the I.I., rather than using his thoughts to communicate. Something about having someone else pick apart his consciousness made Karl uncomfortable. “For example, you’d be happy to know that we’ve improved on your initial cerebral computer designs significantly.”
“And they’d be three times as improved had I been the one working on them,” the I.I. retorted. “Don’t brag about taking a few steps to a roadrunner, pal.”
“Could you please stop calling me ‘pal’?” Karl requested.
“You know I don’t mean it seriously, right?” Maynard said.
“I know.”
It was the second day of trying to work on Karl’s taste-and-scent project, and little to no progress had been made. Maynard insisted on tearing down any idea the psychologist presented, no matter how hypothetical it was to begin with. Even when Karl requested no feedback be given, it was delivered against his will. Since the I.I. communicated straight to his brain, there was nothing he could do to shut the voice out. Plugging his ears did nothing to silence Maynard, nor could any daydream be vivid enough to blot out the I.I.’s constant commentary.
This is what I wanted, Karl had to keep reminding himself. This was my choice.
“Hey, we all make mistakes,” Maynard said, probing into the psychologist’s thoughts. “Don’t beat yourself up about it.”
“I’m not,” Karl replied.
The hang-up the two of them were having, besides basic personality conflicts, was in how the I.I.’s programming read the code injections. The cerebral computer could handle the commands just fine, but when they were passed from the hardware to Maynard, the I.I. could understand the code no better than he could Mandarin. It clearly frustrated Maynard, thus leading to a number of distractions. Since the I.I. had no body with which to drum his fingers or fidget with a pen, the only means of stress relief came from harassing Karl.
Karl, in turn, was constantly fidgeting with a pen while they worked.
“What if we worked backwards?” the psychologist suggested. “We could begin with a code injection you can read, then figure out how to translate it to the cerebral computer.”
“I understand English just fine—why can’t you write it like that?” Maynard whined.
“The cerebral computer isn’t going to do anything with English. It needs a programming language.”
“I know,” Maynard replied. “I’m just screwing with you, man. You are really uptight, you know.”
“And you’re not helping.”
“What made you think I was trying to?”
Karl gritted his teeth. If it were possible to reach inside his own skull and smack Maynard, he would have done it without any further consideration. It wasn’t helping their rapport that the I.I. could hear every unpleasant thought the psychologist might have about him. It was a never-ending back-and-forth of mild animosity.
“We’ve been thinking about this for over a day now, haven’t you come up with any ideas?” Karl asked.
“Sure, but not about this trifle,” Maynard answered. “I’ve been preoccupied with more important matters.”
“Really?” Karl spat, his frustration boiling over. “What do you consider ‘important’?”
The cybernetic engineer hummed inside Karl’s thoughts. “I’ve always thought we should focus more on the decline of honeybees,” he said, his tone sarcastic.
The psychologist tried to ignore him and concentrate on the code before him. Still, there was no mental wall thick enough to keep the I.I. out.
“You know, I was murdered,” the voice in his head started.
“Is that so?” Karl had little patience for sarcastic tall tales.
“It is,” Maynard said. “Yet no one seems to care. Can you imagine how disappointing that is?”
“Thankfully not,” Karl retorted.
“See, you’re just like everyone else,” the I.I. snapped. “Can’t even be inconvenienced by the truth.”
“How were you murdered, then?” Karl asked, his interest absent. “There are no records of it.”
“That’s because they covered it up.”
“Who did?”
“I—I don’t know,” Maynard admitted.
Karl scoffed.
“I don’t remember, okay?” the I.I. started to explain. “But I’ve seen the reports and they don’t match what I know. Someone wanted to hide what really happened.”
“Why?”
“That’s something I’ve been wondering for over three decades. As the inventor of the most controversial smart computer ever made, it’s impossible to say how many enemies I have or why they might hate me.”
“Well, is there any chance you can worry about it after we get this bug sorted out?” Karl urged. “We don’t have forever to work on this.”
“You might not, thanks to mortality,” Maynard argued. “I, however, don’t have the same constraints.”
“You’re not taking this seriously,” Karl started.
“You’re not taking me seriously,” Maynard interrupted.
Karl’s agitation finally bubbled over the brim and he pushed away from his desk with a grunt. He could feel Maynard mocking his frustration internally, and that only drove his focus further away.
“We’ll just pick this up tomorrow,” he said. A sigh of fatigue leaked between his lips
“Aww, you’re tired?” the I.I. commented. “That’s a shame. I didn’t think you were a quitter, but then again, I didn’t think you were much of anything.”
This is going to be a great experiment, Karl thought with disdain.
He had left his session a bit earlier than he’d planned, but that was only to his benefit. Karl could use his extra time to speak with Stewart and see if he’d found any leads as to who sent the threat.
It was strange; the incident in which his C.C. had been hacked had seemed to slip his mind. He was plenty occupied by the work with Maynard and keeping notes, but that didn’t explain it quite well enough. It was as though the threat was part of an old dream, the memory of which only eroded as time went on.
Was it possible that the hackers messed with my mind? Did they make it harder to remember the incident?
No, he thought. What would be the point of sending a threat if you also planned to erase the memory of it? No, it doesn’t make sense. I’m just being paranoid.
He made it into the engineering department without any small talk or unexpected conversations. The psychologist seldom came to this wing of the lab and didn’t want to lose his focus.
Stewart’s window rattled a little when Karl knocked on it. He found it mildly amusing that the glass pane wasn’t better measured, considering it belonged to an engineer.
He waited a moment, then knocked again.
There was some movement
behind him in the hall. He turned and spotted a tall woman with dark hair and an empty bottle of water clutched in her hand.
“Excuse me,” Karl said, “have you seen Stewart?”
“Oh, he’s out,” she replied. “On vacation with his family in Florida. Should be back sometime next week.”
“Thanks.”
Karl turned to walk back out of the engineering department, tail between his legs. The anxiety would just have to weigh on his mind for another week. Until then, he would just have to forgot about the threat and focus on his work.
Like that’s gonna happen, Karl thought sourly.
Compromise
For just a second, if even, the internet video Karl watched buffered. The psychologist was taken aback, thinking long ago to his childhood days when such bandwidth failures were common. He shook his surprise off and quickly refocused his attention on the words being spoken.
The footage had been taken from the floor of the House of Representatives. The camera was focused on an older man with a square face and frosted sideburns.
“Just as many other civil liberty movements of the past, the Humanity Party deserves official representation in all major branches of government,” the man said as he read from a tablet in his hand. “I believe there should be representation for ALL social movements, but the bill I am presenting this morning focuses on that of the Humanity Party.”
The words below the man’s sweaty demeanor identified him as an alt-libertarian legislator from New Hampshire.
“If passed, the Humanity Party would be allowed to nominate candidates of their choice for any major elections held in the next eight years. At that time, I would hope that my counterparts in the Senate extend the provision indefinitely. Are there any objections?”
The camera cut to a much thinner, much older-looking lawmaker with a scowl beneath his rimless glasses.
“Representative, are you not concerned that such legislation could enable any special interest group to seek political involvement, including those categorized as ‘hate organizations’?” the man asked.