The Installed Intelligence Trilogy Collection

by Phoenix Ward

  In the end, she was lucky. They projected about a fourteen percent survival rate, and she made it. They removed the tumor, but unfortunately, they also removed those parts of her brain it had affected. She came out alive and in remission — but she was nearly blinded and entirely deafened.

  Her neural implant was entirely destroyed, but it was discovered soon afterward that an old-fashioned cerebral computer would still be viable for her. It didn’t have nearly the same functionality as a modern N.I., but it allowed her to see better and to hear. It wasn’t perfect — the images were sometimes blurry and the sounds muffled — but she could live a normal life.

  The thing she kept thinking back to, as she presently sat in her office, was the way her father took care of her. Of course, her mother was there as well, but Beth could tell how much the handicap impacted her. She knew that her mother wasn’t taking it as well as she felt she ought to. But her father, however, was a champion. Every night, and even sometimes throughout the day, he’d be reading to her as she stared in the fuzzy gray that was her visual world whenever she turned off visual processing. At first, it was difficult recognizing his voice through the cerebral computer she had been fitted with. It was outdated technology, so a lot of sounds came in fuzzy and distorted, unrecognizable from their normal counterparts. But it didn’t take long for her to associate those strange sounds with the loving tone of her father’s voice.

  Even though she was able to see and hear again, it took years for these functions to be tuned with her brain. She had to have regular checkups with various neuroscientists and bioengineers to figure out how to restore perfect vision and audio. She had to be around fifteen before she heard the sound — the correct sound — of a violin string. It had brought her to tears when she realized how many different tones functioned together to create one beautiful, harmonious note. The years prior were a struggle of angst and emotions as both her and her parents adjusted to the changes.

  She remembered her father reading Harry Potter to her, specifically. It was just when she was returning back to school after the surgery, when things were still fuzzy and distorted. She spent a lot of time crying back then, and her dad would never leave her side. Her mother would pop in occasionally to say something loving or to coo over the sight of them both tucked up by Beth’s bed. She would even bring hot cocoa when it was clear Beth wasn’t falling asleep anytime soon.

  A door opened in the present world and took Beth out of her trance. She had almost been convinced that she was back in her old bedroom, her dad stroking her hair as he recited the events of the Triwizard Tournament.

  Peter So, the coroner, walked into the office. He stopped short when he saw Beth coming to the real world again.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “The door was open.”

  “It’s fine, Peter,” she replied. She reached down into a box of cookies that she kept beside her desk. “Sugar cookie?”

  “I’m alright, thanks,” the coroner said. “Do you mind if I have a seat?”

  Beth couldn’t reply right away as she had helped herself to an entire cookie in a single bite. As she tried to cover her mouth and chew it up, she nodded and gestured to the chair on the other side of her desk.

  Peter took the chair and adjusted his wireframe glasses.

  “You were right to be suspicious of the whole murder-suicide,” he started. “At the Mendez’s, you know.”

  Beth swallowed, perhaps a bit too early, and tears filled her eyes in response to the discomfort. “How do you mean?”

  “Simon Sr.’s brain patterns don’t match his usual readings,” the coroner replied. “We were able to get his N.I. out of his skull without any damage. Looks like the bullet hit only organic matter. According to the neurological readings it had been taking for the last few years, nothing about the way his brain was firing during the murder matched those records.”

  Beth cocked her eyebrow in confusion.

  “So what does that mean? He was having some sort of neurological…episode…while the murder took place?” she asked.

  “I don’t know for sure,” Peter said. “It doesn’t look like a stroke or an aneurysm or anything like that. To me and my instruments, it kinda looks like Simon Sr.’s brain was replaced with someone else’s entirely. Just for a moment, at least.”

  “What? How is that possible?”

  “There’s a number of possibilities, but I’m waiting on the footage from the cat before I jump to any conclusions.”

  “What possibilities?” Beth asked. “I’d like to know what’s on the table.”

  “Well, perhaps it’s like you said: some sort of activity in the brain brought on something like a stroke,” Peter started. “However, I have serious doubts about that. He would have to have some totally-unheard-of condition afflict his brain just at the end of his life, something that we have no modern neurological reports of. It’s possible, like I said, but extremely unlikely.”

  “So, what do you think it is?”

  “If I had to guess, I’d say that the husband’s N.I. falsely picked up the readings of his wife’s I.I.” Peter suggested.

  “So we’d be seeing Janine’s brain scans rather than Simon Sr.’s?” Beth asked.

  “It’s just a theory,” Peter replied. “Honestly, I’m grasping at straws, too. Until we get better data, though, I don’t have much to work with.”

  “Well, it would make sense,” Beth said. “At least from a non-expert’s point-of-view, seeing Janine’s neurological data instead of the husband’s is what I would expect if she had taken control of the body, perhaps just long enough to commit suicide.”

  “It’s plausible, but like I said, we don’t know anything for certain just yet.”

  Beth was about to lean back in her chair and take a generous bite of a cookie when a sharp rap came at her door. It was still ajar from Peter’s entrance, but whoever knocked didn’t seem comfortable taking the invitation.

  “Come in,” Beth said.

  I wonder why they didn’t use the signal tone, she thought.

  A young woman entered the room, a look of desperate uncertainty on her face. Her eyes darted from Beth to Peter, unsure of which one to address. Luckily, the coroner took the lead.

  “Tia, hello,” he greeted her. “Do you have it?”

  The question seemed to take her out of her anxious trance and her eyes locked onto Peter.

  “Yes, doctor,” she said. “I’ve just transferred what footage we could extract from the cat.”

  “Very good,” the coroner replied. “Did you watch any of it?”

  Tia blushed a little.

  “No sir,” she answered. “That would be inappropriate, not to mention illegal.”

  “Excellent, Tia,” Peter said. “That was just a test, you know. You can relax.”

  The young lady acted like she was relaxing, letting her shoulders descend and a sigh of slow air to escape her lips, but the tension in her eyes persisted. She looked at Beth, who met her eyes without comment. The anxiety returned to Tia’s face and she looked away.

  “Is there anything else, doctor?” she asked.

  “No, Tia, that will be all,” Peter said with a gracious nod. “Thank you.”

  The young woman gave a sort of awkward bow before excusing herself from the office. Once she was out of earshot, the coroner turned back to the detective with a chuckle.

  “It’s literally her first day,” he explained. “Please forgive her.”

  “There’s nothing to forgive,” Beth said. “It’s good to know I can still terrify the newbies.”

  She took a bite of her sugar cookie as Peter seemed to become immersed in his implant. A moment of silence passed as the detective chewed.

  “Ah, yes, there it is,” the coroner said, breaking the quiet.

  “The cat footage?” Beth asked, swallowing the last bit of her treat.

  Peter nodded.

  “Care to see it now?” he asked.

  Beth wiped her hands off on her jeans, letting the crumbs fal
l to the wood floor beneath her desk.

  “I don’t see the point in delaying,” she answered. “Sync it up to me.”

  A blank stare returned to Peter’s face as he went back into his implant. Even though she saw it dozens of times every day, Beth couldn’t shake the unnatural feeling that seeing someone’s “implant face” inspired in her.

  “Alright, starting it up now,” Peter said.

  The office gradually faded away, like a stage light dimmed until the darkness had taken everything. Just as slowly, a new scene replaced the office. It was a perfect reconstruction of the Mendezes’ apartment, rendered in flawless holographic 3D, transmitted by Peter’s neural implant and Beth’s cerebral computer. To every sense, it seemed as though they had been standing in the apartment all along, only caught up in a daydream that they were in Beth’s office. But she knew better. Even though everything looked like the Mendezes’, it didn’t quite “feel” like it. Perhaps it was a sixth sense humans didn’t know they had. A Spidey-sense.

  Once the scene materialized entirely, Beth noticed Simon Mendez, Sr. standing in the living room with a gun in his hand. He held the weapon loosely, his arms down at his sides, but there was a slight tremble in his extremities. She could see the man breathing heavily, taking in the trademarked breaths of a being in sheer panic.

  “This is where the footage starts because the cat wasn’t in the room until now,” Peter explained. “It’s the best we can get.”

  Beth shushed him, her eyes fixated on the holographic man. His head was bent downward. She took a few steps around the fake sofa so she could see Simon Sr.’s face. Tears were streaming down his cheeks, illuminated by the soft glow of a lamp that had been on in the Mendez’s apartment. His eyes were closed and his mouth hung loosely open.

  “Why?” the recording of Simon Sr. asked. “Why now?”

  Both Beth and Peter looked around the artificial living room, looking for someone the husband was speaking to. It was dark with deep shadows cast behind every corner, but no form could be found. It appeared Simon Sr. was alone, at least physically.

  “Because now it’s time,” the older man replied to himself. “It’s been a long time coming.”

  “I just don’t understand,” Simon Sr. also said aloud, but in a more vulnerable tone.

  “That’s okay, Dad,” he spoke in a calm, almost menacing manner. “I don’t need you to understand.”

  “Please, son, don’t!” Simon Sr. pleaded.

  The gun trembled in his hand as he lifted it up and rested the barrel against the side of his head.

  “It’ll all be over soon,” he said.

  “Think of your mother!” he also said.

  Simon Sr. put the handgun into his mouth and paused for just a moment. Loud sobs were leaking out from around the weapon, muffled and strained.

  He pulled the trigger. Beth looked away instinctively as the gunshot rang in her ears. When she looked back, the old man was lying dead on the floor, just beside the coffee table where they had found him.

  The holographic projection ended, and the Mendez’s apartment faded away until Peter and Beth were standing in the detective’s office again.

  Simon

  “Simon Mendez, Jr.,” Beth said as she walked into Marcus’s office.

  The redhead furrowed his brow. “Pardon?” he asked.

  “The son,” Beth explained. “He’s the murderer.”

  Marcus had been in the middle of eating his lunch when she entered his office, so he chewed for a moment while he thought.

  “The footage from the cat came back?” Marcus asked.

  Beth nodded.

  “You’re certain it’s the son?” he inquired.

  “It looks like it’s him, Gordon,” she replied. “I’m not certain of anything without evidence.”

  “You don’t think the footage could pass up as evidence?”

  She shook her head. “It’s too flimsy to condemn someone over. Simon Sr. could have been having a mental breakdown, essentially uttering nonsense before taking his own life. It could have been some ploy on part of the mother. We’re not sure, but we do have a lead now.”

  “Alright,” Marcus said, taking a long drink from his water bottle. “What do we know about Simon Mendez, Jr.?”

  “That’s why I came to you,” Beth said. “I know you have bits of the details and I have pieces of the story, so maybe we can work together to paint a complete picture.”

  “Sounds good to me,” Marcus said. He was partially immersed in his implant as he spoke, probably looking for some file on the suspect.

  I hope I don’t look like that when I use my cerebral computer, she thought. She decided that she did not, since the information was sensory rather than internal on her end.

  “First off, we know he killed himself,” Marcus said, clearly still searching for whatever information he was looking for. “About twelve years go this next week.”

  “We’ve discussed that already,” Beth said.

  “But have we?” Marcus asked. “We only know that he committed suicide, and we left it at that. Frankly, there’s a lot of nuance behind it, as with any case like this. We need to be asking ourselves why he did it and how it got us here.”

  “Fine,” Beth said, feeling a bit impatient with Marcus’s philosophical droning. “Why’d he do it?”

  “We’ll start at the beginning, shall we?” her partner replied. “I’ll send you over the documents I have on hand.”

  In less than the blink of an eye, Beth could see the documents forming around in her vision. The pieces and articles she didn’t want to look at just yet hung out in the peripherals, while the ones she concentrated on filled up the bulk of her vision.

  “Simon, Jr. got himself a bit of a criminal record,” Marcus started. Beth followed along with the police report. “As you can see, he was involved in the manufacture and distribution of narcotics. We’re not sure which role he played in the deal, whether he was selling or cooking, but we have him on record with several counts of trafficking charges.”

  “What narcotics?” Beth asked.

  “Fog,” Marcus answered. “Or at least, some early form of it.”

  “He was involved with Fog over twelve years ago?” Beth asked. “That would be around the time the drug came into circulation in the first place.”

  “I know,” Marcus said. “May I continue?”

  Beth waved him on with her hand and picked at a bit of the chips on Marcus’s desk.

  “So there was some sort of incident in their ‘lab’ or whatever you call it,” the redheaded man continued. “An explosion happened and a fire broke out. Someone died. The police were called and Simon was the only one they found at the scene. He was found guilty, dead to rights, and sentenced to twenty years in prison.”

  “And he never ratted on his friends?” Beth asked. “He surely couldn’t have been working by himself.”

  “No, he never cooperated with the authorities on that. He may as well been mute during interrogations.”

  “Stupid loyalty,” Beth commented.

  “I’ll say. And it cost him everything. His freedom, the life of his nephew, and the love of his parents.”

  Beth’s eyebrows cocked, asking the question without words.

  “That’s right, the person killed in the fire was Simon’s own nephew,” Marcus said.

  A news clipping of the tragedy appeared before Beth. A photo of the boy, no more than fifteen, was plastered at the top of the story.

  “His parents disowned him after that,” Marcus carried on. “Said he was dead to them and he was never welcome in the Mendez family again. A year later, he hung himself in prison.”

  “Jeez,” Beth said, reaching for another bit of chips. Marcus slapped her hand away.

  “So he got installed after all that?” Beth asked.

  Marcus raised his eyebrow.

  “That’s where this is leading to, right? Simon was somehow installed and it’s his I.I. that killed his parents, right?”

>   “I’m not sure I’d put it in so eloquent of words, but yeah, that’s my theory,” he replied.

  “But how’d he get out of prison? Didn’t he still have time to serve?”

  “Yes, but legally, his suicide canceled it out,” Marcus explained. “As far as the courts are concerned, a new person is born when an I.I. is installed. The organic human they used to be dies, and they can either live on with their old identity, or don a new one. Whichever one they choose, the law considers a life sentence to be served when the prisoner dies.”

  Beth hummed. “Sounds a bit like a loophole, if you ask me. An easy way out of serving your time and shirking your responsibilities,” she said.

  “Perhaps,” Marcus replied, “but it’s not a common enough occurrence that anything has been done about it. Surprisingly, people aren’t too keen to kill themselves, even if they know their consciousness will carry on.”

  “Really?” Beth asked. “Seems like an easy get-out-of-jail-free card.”

  “Not really,” Marcus said. “The data that makes up their brains will get to carry on its own existence, but that doesn’t mean the organic person gets to experience any of it. When they die, as far as they are concerned, they’re dead. Life ceases for them.”

  “I’ve heard that theory,” Beth commented. “The example I’ve heard is that it’s essentially a form of cloning. It’s not like the two copies share a consciousness, just mental makeup. When the original animal dies, it’s not like its spirit — or soul, or whatever — is transferred into the copy. It just stops existing.”

  “That’s right,” Marcus replied. “It’s why we don’t consider mankind to be immortal — yet.”

  “But is there any proof of this theory?” Beth asked. “The I.I.s seem pretty convinced they are who they were copied from.”

  “Of course they do; they have all the same memories. To them, it felt like they lived their entire organic life, went to sleep, and woke up a computer program. There’s nothing to make them feel like a whole new person.”