“My mother never mentioned it when she went before Congress?”
Jani shrugged.
Feeling stronger now, Stephanie stood and tore the ID bracelet from her wrist. With a satisfying flick, she sent it—and the data file it represented—into the garbage.
“Mom, you’re killing me,” she grumbled before walking over to Jani and pulling her chair away from the desk. “I’ll program the chair to let you logout in twenty hours. If I’m going to hack out of this hospital, it’ll happen before then.”
* * * *
ON HER CHEMO-THIN legs, Stephanie walked out of her room half expecting to step into a lake of ones and zeroes.
But she found her traction socks treading on cold linoleum tiles and her eyes scanning putty-gray walls. She looked right then left and found herself in an endless but otherwise mundane hall. “Amazing. Public hospitals look depressing even in virtual reality.”
Leaning on the wall railing, she began her precarious walk down the hallway.
It was slow going, but no one else was in the halls, thank God. And after a few moments, her mind began to race with the possibilities of her escape.
Her desktop had given her access to the code governing her room. So maybe there were other portals with greater access. Maybe, if she could hack into one of those, she could escape.
But where to go? Logging out of any virtual environment would leave her a synthetic brain stewing in the liquid dark of some government neuroserver. She thought of being trapped in a silicon skull with no sensory input and shuddered.
But there had to be other virtual worlds. “I mean this is the frickin’ future,” she grunted to herself. “The gaming geeks alone must have created a billion online worlds. Maybe I could—”
The squeaking of sneakers made her look up.
It was a forty-something nurse—short, dumpy, blonde, crimson press-on nails. “Honey, are you lost?”
Stephanie’s heart rate accelerated, which was dumb because she didn’t have a physical circulatory system. “I think they gave me the wrong medicine. Do you know my medication?”
“Oh, honey, let’s go ask your doctor. Do you remember your doctor’s name?”
Stephanie shook her head. “How long have you been logged in?”
The nurse smiled. “I don’t know the answer to that, but I bet your doctor does.”
Stephanie rolled her eyes. “Fine. What’s your favorite color?”
“Sugar, I’m going to let the doctor answer your questions. Do you know your doctor’s name? I can page them. And it’s written on your bracelet.”
Stephanie hid her bare wrists behind her back. “You’re not real, huh? You’re a demon.”
The woman put her head to one side. “I’m sorry?”
“Are you a program?” Stephanie asked, exasperated.
The nurse smiled the same smile. “Let’s ask your doctor. Can I see your bracelet?”
Stephanie pulled a prescription out of her pocket. “Dr. Jani told me to give this to you.”
“Oh, good,” the nurse said and took the slip and the data file it represented. A loud hiss filled the air and then the woman froze into perfect stillness. She wasn’t even breathing.
“Nice nails,” Stephanie muttered as she shuffled past the program.
* * * *
STEPHANIE PASSED SEVERAL open doors without turning her head. But in one room a boy was crying for his mother. She hazarded a glance and saw a tall black resident hugging the child so closely he almost enveloped the kid. The doctor was cooing, “I know. I know. It’s awful, buddy. But she can’t visit until you’re better.” The kid wailed louder but the doctor began to rock back and forth and continued. “Oh, oh. I know it’s awful. But I’m here.”
Thinking about all the lies the resident had or would tell the boy, Stephanie scowled and moved on.
“Oh, it’s awful,” the resident cooed. “I know. It’s awful.”
“Going to be a lot more awful if you have to delete the brat,” she grumbled.
“Yes,” said a low voice. “That would be awful. Really really fucking awful.”
Startled, Stephanie looked up and saw a skinny, white-haired Latino man standing before her with crossed arms. “Hello, Stephanie, you can call me Doctor Luis Mandala.”
Her stomach twisted, but she tried not to let that show on her face. She looked the doctor up and down. He was wearing brown dress pants, a long white coat, a blue shirt, and a yellow bowtie with red polka dots.
“If I’m going to be deleted by a cyber shrink,” she asked while nodding at the bowtie, “does it have to be by some East Coast clown who learned to dress in Massachusetts General?”
Dr. Mandala smiled dryly at her. “Johns Hopkins actually.”
Down the hall, a skinny nurse with spiky hair was hurrying toward them. He called out, “Doctor, they’ve just called a code green, and we’re searching—”
Dr. Mandala nodded toward Stephanie. “Here’s your code green. Please help her to my office. This will tell you how to get there.” He pulled a prescription from his coat pocket.
The nurse looked at the slip but did not take it. “The board says Dr. Phillips is the senior attending on call tonight.”
Mandala sighed. “This is a special case. Let me speak to your supervising engineer.”
The nurse held out his cell. Mandala took the device and put it to his ear. “This is Dr. Mandala . . . yes, I know . . . let the nurse access the file and you’ll see the clearance.”
The nurse reached out and took the prescription from Mandala. No one said anything for a moment and Stephanie considered running but then decided to wait for a more opportune moment.
“I know the clearance is old,” Mandala said into the phone. “This is our oldest case.” He waited while whoever was on the other line replied. “Then wake up whomever you need to, but I’m going to evaluate her now. You know how to reach me.” After snapping the cell shut, he handed it to the nurse and nodded to Stephanie. “Carry her, will you?”
Stephanie did not resist as the spiky-haired man hoisted her into the air as if she were a child.
Mandala turned and opened a door, seemingly at random. On the other side was a large, oak-paneled office.
The wooden floors were covered with oriental rugs, the walls with books and ancient Indian paintings. On the far side stood a massive gothic window overlooking a grassy courtyard dotted with elms. It was a cloudy spring morning out there, so the leaves shone pale green in the gray light.
A large oak desk stood in front the window. Before it sat two leather chairs and a sofa so puffy and padded it looked like a tiny upholstered cloud.
Dr. Mandala began to search through the papers on his desk. The nurse set Stephanie down and left through the door they had come through.
It was then that Stephanie saw another door; this one on the wall to her right.
“Please, have a seat,” Mandala said while gesturing vaguely toward the chairs.
Stephanie bolted. Her legs wobbled, and with every step she felt as if she might crash onto her face. But somehow she made it to the door. She yanked it open and dashed through . . . into the same oak paneled office. It even had Dr. Mandala looking around in his desk drawers.
She saw a door on the opposite wall and ran to it.
But when she pulled this door open, she again saw the same office. Dr. Mandala looked up from his desk. She went back into the office she had just left and saw an identical Dr. Mandala looking up from his desk.
“I’m running through a fucking mobius strip,” she panted.
Dr. Mandala smiled. “Your father said ‘barber shop mirror.’ I’d say an M.C. Escher drawing.”
Stephanie frowned at him. “You knew my father?”
The doctor nodded. “I was his student long ago. He asked me to keep an eye on your case. Now, please, sit.”
Tentatively, Stephanie made her way to the couch. As well as looking the part, it felt like a small upholstered cloud. Slowly, she lay back.
Behind her, a chair creaked as Dr. Mandala sat. “You’ve heard of psychoanalysis,” Mandala said tiredly, “the doctor says little and the patient bares their soul? Well, this is analysis, but it’s nothing like that. I will ask specific questions and you must give me specific answers.”
“And if I don’t?”
“We delete you,” he said casually before shifting in his seat. “Stephanie, why do you think people are afraid of uploaded consciousness?”
“Jesus, I don’t know,” she said sullenly and automatically.
Dr. Mandala said nothing but she could hear the scratch of pencil on paper.
She swallowed and tried again. “I guess because they’re afraid uploaded people might do harmful things.”
“Why would uploaded people be harmful?”
She frowned. “Well, they’re still people. At least in the beginning they’d still be people. They’d just be able to do things normal humans couldn’t.”
Dr. Mandala cleared his throat. “So, you’re saying power leads us to hurt others?”
Stephanie shook her head. “Some people hurt others, some don’t or at least try not to. Power just lets us get away with hurting.”
“So really our mistrust of uploaded consciousness is a mistrust of ourselves?”
“Hell, I don’t know,” she replied. “I don’t fear uploaded consciousness. But, yeah, I guess we rightly distrust people with power.”
“So if we are to get along with the uploaded, they would have to have a morality different than ours?”
“Well, they’d have to resist temptations we can’t.”
“Have you heard about the idea that our morality has its roots in our genes?”
Stephanie shrugged. “Who hasn’t?”
Mandala sniffed. “Most fourteen-year-olds.”
She scowled at the ceiling. “Well, you’ve been spinning me about this cyber hamster wheel for fifty years, so that makes me sixty-four.”
Mandala’s voice became weary. “Trust me, Stephanie, no one is more aware of that than I am. But do you buy it? Does human morality have its roots in DNA?”
She chewed her lip. “A bit. I mean if we all have the capacity for morality and we all come from DNA, then it follows that the capacity also comes from the DNA.”
His pencil scratched. “It’s an interesting idea when we consider that uploading people breaks their ties to their bodies and therefore to their genes.”
Stephanie chewed her lip. “I guess that’s one reason why we can’t trust the uploaded. Whatever genetic guidelines we have wouldn’t apply to them, especially after they began to evolve.”
“I wonder . . . ” Dr. Mandala said in a slow way that made Stephanie think he didn’t wonder at all, “if there might be a way to give a neuroprocessor an inherited piece of our morality.”
“What, like hack out the moral part of us and get a neuroprocessor to swallow it?”
“Swallow it?” he asked slowly.
But Stephanie wasn’t listening. A sudden strange warmth was flushing through her chest. A riot of ideas erupted from her mind like wildflowers from spring mud. “You know, maybe we could trust uploaded people if we shared a moral ancestry. Maybe, if they could inherit a moral capability that was like ours and could handle the dilemmas facing post-humans . . . maybe then we could trust them.”
Dr. Mandala cleared his throat. “Have you thought much about this issue before?”
“Don’t be dumb; you haven’t let me think of anything for the last fifty years,” she snapped but then paused. “But, if you think about it . . . how could neuroprocessors evolve a moral capacity that’s related to our moral capacity? I mean . . . we already have moral capacity, and they don’t.”
The warmth in her chest blossomed even further. “You know in evolution there’s this thing called horizontal gene transfer, where you can give genetic information to organisms that aren’t your children. Bacteria do it all the time because they have this freaky reproduction without sex and sex without reproduction thing going on, and for a long time we didn’t know about prokaryotes transferring genes laterally . . . but I remember reading about how mitochondria and chloroplasts probably evolved when an early prokaryote swallowed a bacteria . . . that . . . ”
The warmth in her chest vanished and her stomach clenched. She reached in to her gown pocket and drew out the small glass snake biting its own tail. It still had the name Carsonellia rudii written on its belly.
“Go on,” Dr. Mandala said gently. “What does lateral gene transfer have to do with neuroprocessors gaining morality?”
Stephanie turned the snake over and over in her hands. It became warm and grew in diameter until its fangs gripped only the tip of its tail. She slipped it over her hand and wore it as a bracelet.
Her head felt light. “Because,” she heard herself say, “species can evolve together if they can become dependent on each other. If they’re willing to give up something.”
He made a small “huh” sound. “What are you thinking of?”
Her voice came softly, almost in a monotone. “Maybe a human mind could strip itself down of all memory and identity until it was pure moral capacity . . . the same way some ancient bacterium gave up more and more DNA until they it was nothing more than a proton pump . . . until it was a mitochondria.”
Dr. Mandala’s pencil was scratching again. “So this mind that’s been stripped down would become . . . what? An organelle that instead of providing molecules to a cell provided moral capacity to a neurocomputer?”
Again the wonderful warmth of revelation filled Stephanie’s chest. “Yes,” she said through a growing smile. “Until now, computers have been simple things, more or less uniform on the inside and designed to do relatively simple tasks. They’re like bacteria, like prokaryotes. But if they could endocytose morality or spirituality or . . . or who knows what, then they would become infinitely more complex. They’d be . . . eukaryotic computers I guess. They’d evolve but not in any way we’ve yet imagined. They wouldn’t evolve vertically—wouldn’t become smarter or more powerful. They’d evolve horizontally: they’d become more . . . more human. Slowly we would come to trust them. Our species would be relatives . . . symbiotic cousins.”
Dr. Mandala took a long breath and then said, “Stephanie, this is a very large dream.”
“Oh, it’s not mine,” she said. “It’s my mother’s, I’m sure. I’ve been remembering things. I’m sure this is something she once told me. And she sent me a message through a glass snake that’s biting its own . . . or at least I think she sent it to me. I don’t really . . . ” Her voice trailed off as she realized that she had been unconsciously turning the snake around her wrist.
Like everything else in the hospital, the snake represented a bit of software. She had tried, unsuccessfully, to use her desktop to discern what type of program or file it was.
She held out her arm so that Dr. Mandala could see her bracelet. “Do you know what this is?”
There was a long pause. “A program, I would guess,” he said at last.
“Do you know who wrote it?”
He laughed softly. “You did, of course.”
Shocked, she sat up and looked at him.
He smiled gently. “Stephanie, as you noted, you’re not really fourteen. Counting the years since your birth makes you sixty-seven. You’ve spent most days on your desktop studying. At first you followed your mother’s work, read everything she published. Then you became obsessed with neurotech and evolution. Of course, we reset your mind whenever your studies brought you too close to realizing that you had been uploaded. The residents rotate every few months, so none ever noticed what I have—that you unconsciously retain everything you learn before we reset you.”
Stephanie closed her eyes and pressed her cold fingers to her cheeks. “You’ve been watching me that closely?”
He was silent for a long moment. “Once a month or so I check in on you. And then there are our conversations.”
“We’ve talked
before? How many times?”
He looked up and seemed to think for a while. “Eleven or twelve times, I’d guess. When I first took this job, you would hack out of your room every three years or so. After a decade, you started to escape every two years. But now . . . well this is our third meeting this year.”
Suddenly it felt as if she were inhaling through a straw. She had to put her head between her legs for a few moments before she could ask, “Aren’t you supposed to delete me after I realize what I am?”
He grunted. “That’s exactly what I’m supposed to do. But your father asked us—my predecessor and then me—to help you. He knew you were going to hack out and asked that we stop the state of California from deleting you. It’s very illegal, but I’m well protected. Mandala is a pseudonym. One of your father’s choosing. And, in any case, I would have done any number of riskier things for him. I owed your father a great deal and—” he cleared his throat “—he owned the controlling interest in Concinnity Corp. But that’s neither here nor there.”
Feeling better, Stephanie sat up.
Dr. Mandala was rubbing his chin. “You see, we have programs that let me know when you escape. When that happens I swoop into California’s servers, show off my federal authority, and pull you back here for a false analysis. Afterward I reset you and claim that we caught you just in time.”
“Why didn’t you tell me this?” she nearly squeaked.
He looked at her and shook his head. “Your father’s orders. Before I tell you the truth, I’m to coax you until you come up with this idea of eukaryotic computers on your own.”
Stephanie gawked. “He knew? My dad knew I’d have this idea? So did he write this program?” She tapped her snake bracelet.
Mandala shook his head. “No, no. As I said, you wrote it. I first saw it maybe seven years ago. And I’m not sure how he knew about your eukaryotic idea. He always called it that, by the way, ‘Stephanie’s idea.’ Far as I could tell, he believed it would become a reality. He said you were an essential part of its success.”
Stephanie had to take several long breaths before she could speak. “But how did he know? How could my idea ever really happen?”
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