by Paula Guran
“When the time comes, when the job is done, Chosen One, the knife will help you to freedom.” Bak turns the blade over in his hands. The king’s emblems, the bird and the bread, are stamped into the gold banding. “Thank you, Your Majesty.”
But Mentuhotep has already turned back to the scribe.
“See that this decree is copied a dozen times before daybreak. Take a copy to my brother, and another to the high priest.” The king gasps. His back arches against the bed, as if he is a cow straining in a harness.
“And one more thing. Do not show Amenemhat until after you have distributed it throughout the city.”
The king waggles a finger at Bak. “And now, some water,” he commands. Bak conceals the knife within the threads of his tunic, and moves.
A pot of coffee sits brewing on the table, leaking steam, begging to be poured. Lentini cracks first, and plunges. He pours himself a mugful, leaving the others to help themselves. Ruth watches him take a sip and suck it through his teeth, like he is tasting wine. She half expects him to gargle it, or call for a spittoon, but eventually he swallows.
She reaches across the table, and retrieves the coffee pot for herself.
Botha is chairing the meeting, as always. Mourad sits at his right hand, leafing through ring-binders that seem to multiply before their very eyes.
“So the Reinvigoration is on schedule?” asks Botha.
Lentini gulps down his mouthful of coffee. “Is more intensive than we expected. I have changed way-points yesterday, now every six hours.”
“Six? That is a lot of personnel time,” says Mourad.
“Ya, ya,” says Botha. “But you can afford it?”
Mourad shrugs. Of course he can.
“Good. Well, that means we can look at pulling Good King Wenceslas out of the tank in, what, thirteen days?”
“Mentuhotep” says Ruth. Botha gallops past the correction. “Is that long enough for you to be ready, Ruth?”
“I think so. But this is orders of magnitude greater than what we’ve done previously. We’re not working with a fresh CNS here. There would have been some degradation between death and the embalming.”
Mourad quickly flips the sheets in his binder, then taps a page with his pen. “Several days,” he says.
Ruth nods. “I’ve been thinking we should run the algorithms at a slightly slower rate, give ourselves some redundancy.”
“But will that be stable?” asks Botha. “We’ve got to keep the top spinning, ya know.”
Ruth is well aware of the technicalities. “Yes, it should be fine with just a little more power in the system. I would like to do at least three more test runs first.”
Botha waves her away. “Fine, fine, whatever.”
“Not fresh ones, though. And not from last year’s vintage either. I need the originals.”
Mourad looks up. Lentini raises his eyebrows. Botha groans. “But they’re my last ones from Shenzhen, Ruth. You’re betting my whole fucking zoo on this.”
Ruth says nothing. Everyone knows she is right, including Botha, who throws up his hands.
“Ah, Ruth, you’re killing me! All right then. Those orangutans will have a hell of a shock when they come out of the freezer!” Mourad and Lentini chuckle.
Will they, though? thinks Ruth. Will they even notice time has passed? Surely they just pick up where they left off? That’s how Reignition works. You do not need to know how a brain actually processes information or how self-awareness happens. You just need to connect the synapses together as they were before, and set the mechanism going again. Bypass all the theories of mind. You do not need to worry about concepts like “creativity” and “consciousness.” That was her great insight, and that was why Frans Botha, who hates all that philosophy, turned up at her room in Boston one day and offered her an obscene amount of money.
Ruth wonders what it is like to be in the freezer. The monkeys are clinically dead, but a trace of the synaptic connections remains. Whatever the configuration of the cells at the moment of freezing, it remains while they are in storage. The thought persists.
What if, one day, it is Ruth in the freezer, and she is stuck with one thought for a week, a year, or longer? Better make damned sure that it is a good one.
She already knows what that thought will be. Little Esther. Only two years old, when she was taken from them, but still perfectly formed, a complete thing.
She can still, if she tries, recall the last days, the last moments of Esther. The breathing becoming shallower, greater pause between each, until there were no more. She and Daniel fell asleep with Esther in their arms, and the doctor, God bless him, let them sleep together, and the thought, the dream, was of Esther breathing, hugging. She thanked the doctor for that, the extra hour of feeling her daughter was with her. By the time she woke up again, Esther was already under the sheet and getting cold.
Everyone steps around that moment, but it doesn’t haunt her. It is but a single memory, a few weak synapses, and it is already fading. When she thinks of Esther, her mind goes straight to the stronger, earlier memories. A kinetic recollection of waddling, running and giggling. The unfettered beam that only a child who does not understand the world, her own mortality, could possibly wear. Ruth remembers Esther’s delirious delight at discovering her hiding place behind the cushions in the living room. That’s the expression Ruth remembers when she thinks of Esther. The curves of her cheeks, the parabola of her smile. The pain comes when she recalls, as she must, that the smile is no more.
Ruth retraces that smile in her thoughts every day, and she fancies the memory has become thicker in her brain. She has made up her mind. That is the smile she will picture if ever she goes into the freezer. If she is going to have one thought for a year, or a decade or a century or longer, then Esther’s smile shall be it.
It’s even worth hedging my bets, thinks Ruth. Even if I don’t make it to the freezer. Who knows what technology Botha’s team will develop in the next few years. Maybe a preservation process won’t be necessary, and they’ll find some other way to perform Triple R. Isn’t that why we’re experimenting with Mentuhotep?
I should still picture Esther’s smile, she thinks. In moments of peril, if there are any, but also just when going about the day. Death creeps up at any moment. I could have a heart attack, she thinks. She has already made a habit of putting Esther into her head before she crosses the road. You never know when a careless moped or a runaway tram could end it all. Best be ready with a happy thought to see you through eternity.
“Are you with us, Ruth?” Botha’s voice crashes into her awareness. “You were away with the angels, eh? I know it’s too late and we’re all tired, but just stick with us for a few more hours, ya? We need to be solid on this.”
“Sorry, Frans,” she says, and takes a big gulp of coffee.
A dark, serene service corridor behind the royal chambers, the soft pad of feet on flagstones, and a metal-clad fist that erupts into Bak’s jaw with such force that the passage becomes a blinding red. The wall slams his other flank and seems to go right through him. The stone floor leaps into his face, and his mouth crackles like kindling on a fire.
A foot places itself on Bak’s spine and presses down on his back. He cannot help but exhale. Pain shoots though his ribs, and he feels wet air rushing through a part of his cheek.
In just one ear, Bak hears the clink of jewelry. From the other ear, there is nothing, it is numb. His tormentor kneels down.
“So you want to be vizier, do you, Bak?” sneers Amenemhat. “Or maybe you should just be the new pharaoh?”
Bak emits a grunt that he hopes will be interpreted as a denial.
“The king has me riding out East with an army, all to go mining stone for his . . . his sacrilegious coffin. Imagine my surprise to hear that, in my absence, a new advisor has found favor with His Majesty.”
Bak manages another grunt, this time an attempt at protest.
“You think that, because the king speaks to you now, that yo
u are special? You are a deluded worm, Bak. He talks to you because you are there, nothing more. You were born a slave and that is all you will ever be. The king is dying, and when he goes, so will you. I will make sure of it, Bak.”
Amenemhat stands, straightens his robes, and kicks Bak squarely in the groin. This time, Bak howls.
“You are not to say another word to the king in this life, do you understand?”
Bak nods furiously.
“Keep quiet, and I may just have you sent out to the mines in Siwa. A strong young man like you might find purpose out there. But if you continue this delusional partnership with the king, I will personally slit you open from your throat to your arse and let the rats feast on your organs, and you can journey into the afterlife without them.”
Ruth is alone with a family-size bag of chips, a quart of orange juice, and a gilt-edged framed portrait of the emir. Her office is actually a repurposed laboratory. The benches are long and have sinks sunk into them. Fifteen technicians could work here comfortably, but Botha and Mourad have given the entire room over to her project. So she sits at one end of this sanitized cavern with her laptop, perching on a tall wooden stool. If she were back at her penthouse she could have the ergonomic armchair she had Daniel ship over from the house in Boston. But she cannot directly program the Decision Array from her apartment, so she has to stay at the Institute and ruin her back.
She has a terminal window open, full screen. Back at MIT they coded an entire front-end to run the early experiments, but she has hacked the back-end of the system so much since she came to work with Botha that the interface has stopped working. Frans has offered to hire someone in to update it for her, but frankly, she prefers working direct with the code. It’s easier not to have to second guess the Graphical User Interface, or worse, wait for the operating system to perform an elaborate animation every time she opens or closes a window. Once at FERMI, she remembers with a chuckle, they had to restart the accelerator at a cost of several thousand dollars because one of the computers crashed at a crucial moment, and that turned out to be the fault of an elaborate pop-up window. Far better to just type the commands into the machine and hit ENTER when you’re done.
The only problem with her method is that she doesn’t have a clock on the screen. Ruth realizes that she has absolutely no idea what time it is. The strip lighting is as bright in the middle of the night as it is at noon. She doesn’t make a habit of pulling an all-nighter, and hopes she will be able to get out of here for a few hours’ sleep before the embarrassing moment when the technicians, or worse, Doctors Botha and Lentini, start wandering in. She can do without Frans telling her she stinks again.
But for now, the entire facility is empty, save for the security guards, and she needs to get a new iteration of her algorithm done. That means reviewing the data from the latest Reignitions, the three orangutans from Shenzhen, which she has done twice already. But there remains one set of data that she has not yet dared to approach. The results from the only other time that the Reignition process has been applied to a viable human brain.
She knows that she cannot ignore this dataset. Lentini likes to wax about how all mammal organs are essentially the same, ninety-nine point nine percent similarity in the DNA, Ruth, yadda yadda, and if he can Reinvigorate a monkey’s heart he can do the same with a human heart.
But for the task Ruth is charged with, human brains and monkey brains are very different indeed. You cannot simply apply the same algorithms and expect the Reignition to go smoothly. The particular physiology of the human brain needs to be taken into account, and the frequency and pattern of the connections are unique to the species. The order in which the synaptic jolts need to take place is also crucial. If you start in the wrong area of the brain, the system cannot help but make mistakes that will multiply at an exponential rate.
Ruth remembers that first and only human Reignition. It had been another boring day of tests, and only really began in the evening, when Botha burst into her lab like a kid at Christmas.
“A donor, Ruth! We’ve got a donor!” he shouted, then ran off down the corridor to shout the same thing at Lentini.
By the time she caught up, Mourad was with them and was already explaining the circumstances. “A car accident. He lived for a while, made it to the hospital. He was in pain but we offered him a lot of money. It will feed his family for life.”
“But hold on, did anyone explain—”
Botha jumped in: “No time to chew this over, Ruth. Get the kit set up. We’re going straight to Reignition. We have a short window!”
Thinking back now, Ruth knows that was the point when she should have stood her ground, when she could have objected. But instead she did what she was told and rushed back to her lab to plug in her equipment. In truth, she was elated by the prospect of taking the Reignition to the next level. She believed in seizing opportunities, didn’t she? Why else would she be here out in the desert? So she gave all the electrodes to the assistants, set the computer running, and made some on-the-fly adjustments to the algorithm. By the time she was confronted with the dead man’s disembodied head, he was already rigged up to the machine, ready to go, and all she could think of was that stopping the procedure now would be like the time with the computer crash at FERMI. Once the machines are running, it wastes a lot of time and money if you stop them mid-cycle.
She is so ashamed she said nothing. Sometimes, she is incredulous she managed to keep working, that she had the focus to look at the diagnostic data displayed on her screen and not at the bloodied head of the person whose synapses her computer was reconnecting at a rate of sixteen and a half thousand decisions per second.
But she is always, always, thankful that when she saw the head mouth the words Allahu Akbar, she hit the kill switch immediately.
Botha was livid, of course. “What the fuck, Ruth? We were nearly there! We could have got him stabilized!”
She screamed back at him as she walked out the door. “It’s a head with no body. We went far enough!”
Three months later, they have never discussed where the severed head came from. Ruth knows that Mourad’s story about a car accident was a lie, and she is sure that Botha and Lentini know the truth too. That evening binds the four of them together, and they persist with their work.
Ruth shudders in disgust, at Botha and Lentini and Mourad, but also at herself.
I need a break, she thinks, and types a familiar command into the prompt. The entire screen turns bright green. A moment later, rows of hearts, diamonds, spades, and clubs appear on her screen. Ah, Pyramid Solitaire, my old friend! She snorts to herself at the simplicity of the game. The cards are dealt. The sequence is set. There is no skill to this whatsoever. Whether or not she will be able to solve this hand has already been determined. She just has to iterate, and the kings and the queens will fulfill whatever destiny fate has decreed. Just one game, Ruth, she says to herself, and then back to work.
After his exertions with the decree, the king is now sleeping, and may never wake. And while the Divine One is neither conscious nor dead, Bak may pause. So he is alone on the roof of the palace, and there is nothing between him and a king’s sky, pale blue and unsullied by clouds.
He watches as the sun grazes the tops of the mountains, and feels the rays cool a little. Have the shadows of the peaks reached the palace already? Bak looks over his shoulder and sees his own shadow stretch many lengths behind him, like the train of a rich man’s cloak.
He turns back and looks down at the city below him, already in the shade but still bright. If it were not for the swelling in his face, he might make believe that he were surveying his own kingdom. But whoever heard of a a king with a black eye and a gash in his cheek? Through his good ear, he hears the chat of the city pick up as the laborers filter through the walls from a day in the fields, and the merchants begin to pack up their wares. Soon they will be home with their families.
Bak looks down at a yellow alleyway running toward the palace. He can make
out a young man picking his way up the track, hopping this way and that to avoid the animal dung. His face is too far away to make out features, but Bak can see a purpose in the gait. He is walking toward a wife, probably, and maybe some children. Or maybe a drink at one of the communal houses? Either way, now that the sun recedes, that is a man who can choose where he walks. Bak watches until he disappears through one of the many gates in the city wall.
A long, low wail draws him back into the confines of the palace. A female drone, a single note, that is soon joined by another, and then another, and they unite in an ugly harmony. Male shouts join the composition. A percussion of footsteps urgently moving through the narrow alleyways between the palace buildings. Quite suddenly, a human yelp drowns out the chorus. “It has happened!”
Mentuhotep has left this life. He has taken his first steps toward his room in the palace of the immortals.
Now could be Bak’s chance to abscond. Over the last few days, during the king’s short illness, the palace has become a tightly wound spring. Arrangements for the funeral and the succession have been planned in increasing detail, and all the priests and laborers and artisans and cooks and slaves are poised and ready to act. In a moment, at word from one of the heralds, the kingdom will burst into mourning. Everyone in the city will have some business up at the palace, and everyone in the palace will have some business down in the city. Right now, as it begins, thinks Bak, this could be the moment to hop quietly over the walls and disappear into the swarm.
But he is no longer the anonymous slave he was last week. Attention has been drawn to him. He has been entrusted with a task by the dead king, and thanks to that nervous scribe doing his job properly, everyone knows it. If he runs, he will be missed immediately. And his injuries, the great swollen bruise and the new scar that extends his smile, will make him easier to spot.
Bak reaches into the pocket of his tunic and runs his thumb over the handle of the king’s knife. He can feel the grooves of Mentuhotep’s emblem. The private gift that sealed a divine contract. If he plays his part in the funeral, if he can dispatch his king safely into the next life in one piece, then he might be able to walk out of the city without being harassed. And who knows what might follow? A job that he can choose.