by Dima Zales
I grab a pencil and the SAT test, figuring it could be useful since I can look up my old score for comparison. Then again, I scored very high to get into MIT, so my boosted intelligence doesn’t have much wiggle room to show off.
I take the test, minus the essay. My first shock is how long it takes me to finish. I initially figured time flew by because I was busy, but as it turns out, it took me less than two hours to complete the test, which is nearly half the time you’re given. The second shock is how many questions I messed up.
None. I made zero errors.
My test score to get into MIT was very good, but I still got a couple of English questions wrong, as well as a math one. What’s key is that I took the SAT after my mom convinced me to take a year of Kaplan prep courses, which really helped, despite the SAT allegedly being an aptitude test.
So did I do so well because of Ada’s boost? It sure looks that way. I understand my English score might’ve naturally improved over time; after all, I’ve been in this country longer now and learned my second language on a deeper level. A better math score is trickier to explain. If anything, I expected it to drop since I haven’t used any math outside of tip calculations since my last calculus class back in college. When I do have to calculate something more complicated, I resort to Excel, the calculator app, Mathematica, and other similar tools. Yet instead of dropping, my math score improved. Then again, it only improved by one question, so I could argue that the one question I screwed up in high school was a fluke and not statistically significant anyway.
The solution is obvious: I need to disable the brain boost and take another SAT.
Hesitantly, I mentally click the brain-looking app icon and examine myself. I think I’m the same, but it’s hard to tell right away.
I grab another SAT test, and as soon as I read my first math question, I can tell things won’t go as well for me this time around. I find it difficult to concentrate on the question, and I have a hard time caring about solving the problem. I push through my reluctance and do my best to focus.
Halfway through the math section, I decide I’ve had enough. The English section doesn’t fare much better, and I only end up doing about a quarter of the questions. This, in itself, proves something about the boost.
When I check my answers, it turns out I messed up three math questions and a whopping six English questions. So the boost is real and can, at the very least, have an impact on tests.
I bring AROS back up and enable the boost.
This time, I can actually feel the difference in my state of being. It’s subtle, but my surroundings seem more solid, the edges of objects sharper and all the colors brighter. It might be an illusion, but I also feel as though I understand certain things that previously eluded me. I have a eureka moment when I think back to that tricky math question I stumbled on a few minutes ago. It’s obvious to me now that a silo consists of a cylinder and two cones.
Another difference is that I no longer feel that strange mental fatigue when it comes to intellectual pursuits. To test out that theory, I decide now is a good time to do a little programming.
I mentally open Ada’s pet IDE program and spend the next few hours reading the necessary documentation and mucking around with it. Once I feel up to it, I start writing my first AROS application.
The result is just a few lines, most of them dedicated to including the right API libraries. Still, I feel a glimmer of pride when I mentally press the compile icon and don’t get any error messages. I build the app and send it into my head space.
A gray icon appears in my apps list, and I launch it.
A text window shows up in the air in front of me, just for a fraction of a second. I grin as I glance at its message. Honoring the tradition of all introductory programming tasks, it boldly states, “Hello, World.”
I’ll be the first to admit that the utility of the program is nonexistent. Still, it’s a step toward almost literally expanding my own mind.
I check out the MCAT test next and decide I could do very well on it, especially if I cheat by Googling all the biological facts and other things beyond my educational background. Since I can do the searches lightning fast in my head, I could probably get a super-high score within the time limit. I don’t actually take the MCAT, though, because I’m getting tired and hungry from all this mental work.
I contemplate summoning the stewardess but decide to check Ada’s backpack first, since she said she packed me some sandwiches.
It takes me a second to spot the cardboard box at the bottom. As I pull it out, I notice there’s a strange heft to it.
I place it comfortably on my lap and open the lid. I’m lucky I can’t drop the box now, because if I could, I probably would have.
Two very non-hungry pink eyes stare up at me from inside the box.
Chapter Twenty-Four
“Mr. Spock?” I say, spotting the pink stripe on the white rat staring up at me from the box. Inside is some sort of veggie wrap with a couple of rat bites in it. “What the hell are you doing here?”
Mr. Spock’s whiskers move back and forth, and his perceptive little eyes seem to say, “What does it look like? I had some lunch and now I’m chillin’.”
Taking out my phone, I get onto the plane’s Wi-Fi and video-conference Ada.
“Mike?” she says. “I see you’re using your phone like a person without Brainocytes.”
“I need the camera so I can show you this.” I point my phone at the box.
“Mr. Spock?” Ada sounds more incredulous than I feel, an impressive feat given how shocked I was to find the stowaway. “Baby, what the hell are you doing there?”
“That’s what I asked him a second ago,” I say. “But I didn’t call him baby.”
Ada looks distant for a moment. “He’s not scared. Best I can make sense of this is he likes you. Likes you enough to decide to go with you.”
“How do you know how he feels?” I study the rat, wondering how he’d look if he was scared, or, for that matter, how he’d look if he liked me. “You don’t think he came with me by accident? I mean, he ate the food you prepared for me. Maybe he was in the box when—”
“I get where you’re going with this, but I highly doubt it,” Ada says. “I can review his data in a bit, but I think he followed you willingly.”
I look at Ada and then at the rat, hoping one of them will explain what she’s talking about. Neither of them enlightens me, so I ask, “What data? How does a rat have data?”
“Okay, please don’t judge me.” Ada bites her lip. “It has to do with experiments I’ve been performing on my little darlings. More specifically, with the apps I’m running inside and outside their heads. These things are easier to implement in rats since their brains are extremely well studied and simpler to boot, plus their privacy is less of a concern.”
“I’m not judging,” I say when I see how distraught she looks.
“The data I mentioned is what I collect from Mr. Spock’s sensorium. I store everything he and the others see and hear. I even have access to their whiskers’ perception—”
“You can see everything the rats see?”
“Yes, and I can map out their basic emotions, as well as some of their bodily needs,” Ada says. “And I have a way of communicating with them that’s better than using verbal commands. I can also control their behavior using Augmented Reality constructs —”
“Wait, what?” I look at Mr. Spock again. “You created Virtual Reality for rats?”
“No. Though I could, in theory, create VR for them, I only augment their reality. For example, I can make them see the walls of a maze that isn’t there. The tech is very similar to the way you see the AROS icons. This way, I can get them to run where I want them to, though I don’t use it since they’re now bright enough to avoid trouble on their own. Their brain boosts are far more advanced than ours—”
Ada keeps talking, but I don’t hear her. Dread grips me, and it’s not because I’ve had an animal rights activist awaken
inside me. The Brainocyte technology is in its infancy, but Ada’s already implemented the basics for perfect surveillance, as well as mind reading—not to mention mind control. All this would be very scary if done to a human brain instead of a rat’s.
“—in any case, we are where we are,” I hear Ada say when I bring my attention back to her. “Please, take care of Mr. Spock. I’ll make sure to include some of the apps I mentioned to assist you.”
“Of course,” I say, shaking my head to clear the remnants of my paranoia. “Are you sure you don’t want me to leave him here, on the plane?”
“No,” Ada says. “Take him with you. He’ll be lonely on his own or with strangers.”
“Fine,” I say. “I will. Now can you please explain why he’s always chewing on something?” I point at Mr. Spock’s jaw. It’s moving up and down, and his nose is crinkling.
“He’s just bruxing,” Ada says. “He does it when he feels safe.”
I mentally Google the word and find at least a dozen YouTube videos of rats serenely grinding their teeth.
Spock stops bruxing to clean his snout with his front paws.
“Okay, that’s cute,” I tell Ada. “But I hope he can hide. As cool as it would be to look like a pirate with a rat on my shoulder, the Russian people, or any people, might not understand.”
“Mr. Spock,” Ada says, her tone switching to baby talk. “Please hide in Mike’s pocket.”
Before I get a chance to raise any objections, the rat scurries up the side of the box into my lap. Then he jumps into my tweed jacket and hides inside the inner pocket.
“Wow,” I say. “Can you give me the app that displays his emotions?”
“I’ll get you that, along with one of the first apps Mitya and I put together for your trip,” Ada says and closes her eyes—I presume to work with her AROS.
The world around me flickers in that signature AROS-update fashion. I bring up all the icons and see a couple of new ones.
“The one that looks like a mood ring is the one I call EmoRat,” Ada says. “Try it.”
I enable the icon, but nothing happens.
“Mr. Spock,” Ada says soothingly. “Come out for a second so we can see you.”
Spock peeks his head out from his hiding place. There’s a subtle green aura around his head, like a halo.
“The basics are the same as a mood ring,” Ada says. “The highlights include green, for average wellbeing, blue-green for somewhat relaxed, solid blue for relaxed and calm, and violet for very happy. Just like with a mood ring, you want to avoid amber, which means he’s unsettled, the gray of anxiety, and especially the tension of the black moods.”
I use a notepad app to create a mental reminder for the rat mood colors and say, “I’ll try to avoid those.”
“Oh, and there’s special emoticon-like stuff you’ll sometimes see. Like this one”—a circle with a toilet in the middle shows up as a bubble over Mr. Spock’s head—“means the little guy needs to go to the bathroom.”
“Got it,” I say gratefully and take Mr. Spock to the bathroom.
“Now for the next app,” Ada says when I return. “I want you to strap on the camera I left in the bag for you.”
I rummage through the bag and locate one of those GoPro chest setups for people who are into extreme sports. “You mean this harness?”
“Yeah, that getup is to make sure Mitya and I can see what you see and hear what you hear,” Ada explains. “Since you’re a human being and not a rat, I figured you’d prefer a camera. I didn’t realize you’d have Mr. Spock with you. The camera’s less important now, since I can hear your surroundings through his ears, and if he peeks out of your pocket, I’ll see through his eyes. But having him peek out could be problematic, and since we coded the camera solution already, we might as well test it out. So please, put that on.”
I carefully take off my jacket and put on the harness.
“I probably look ridiculous,” I say as I put the jacket back on without buttoning it.
Mr. Spock pops his head out to check what’s happening. I think he decides I indeed look ridiculous, because his color changes from anxious to relaxed.
“You look fine,” Ada says. “Now, launch the camera icon and the one that looks like an angel.”
I locate the two icons and enable them one after the other.
“Awesome,” Ada says from both my phone and to my right. “I can see through the camera and hear the roar of the plane.”
I look toward the new source of her voice and nearly drop my phone again.
A small figure is floating in the air to my right. She looks like Ada—if Ada were ten times smaller and dressed as a Valentine’s Day cherub. She has a halo, a white toga, and a pair of wings. Only the bow and arrows are missing.
“What’s happening?” I ask.
“It’s an Augmented Reality interface,” the angelic Ada says, and I confirm that her voice is coming from the creature’s mouth. “I can hear you through the camera just fine.”
I study her closer and realize her outfit and facial expressions aren’t as realistic as in the video conference. Still, they’re pretty darn good, especially for a 3D hologram or whatever the proper term is.
“This is far too sophisticated even for you guys to have put together in a few hours.” I try grabbing the flying Ada, but, obviously, my hand goes through her.
“Have you heard of Centaur censors?” Ada asks.
I nod, things already becoming clearer. She’s talking about Mitya’s company that developed special cameras optimized for reading facial expressions.
“Well, we combined it with something he still has in development and voilà.” Ada flies a circle around me. “I can control the avatar with my mind, like a video game, but the facial features work via the Centaur interface and mimic mine.”
Punctuating her point, she winks at me and licks her lips salaciously.
“Please don’t do that,” I say. “My mind just got flooded with the weirdest imagery.”
“Oh.” Ada’s expression becomes foxlike. “If Mitya wasn’t sitting next to me and privy to this conversation, I’d put worse ideas into your head.”
“But I’m here,” Mitya says from a distance. “So stop it. Now.”
“Okay,” Ada says with a pout. “I guess it’s only fair for you to launch the little devil icon. And while you’re at it, launch that instant messenger icon that looks like a tiny penguin wearing pince-nez.”
I launch the icon and hear Mitya say from my left, “Before you ask, that instant messenger is based on Pidgin—”
“Dude,” I interrupt, looking to my left. “Do you really think that’s what I was going to ask about?”
On my left, I see Mitya, only like Ada, he’s ten times smaller than normal. Also like her, he’s floating in the air and has wings that aren’t actually beating. The difference is that Mitya looks like a little red devil with hoofed feet, horns, and a tail.
“Ada picked the theme,” he says defensively. “I just kind of went with it.”
“You guys are having way too much fun with this,” I mutter and log in to the instant messenger, figuring I might as well test it out.
Making sure I have my friends added to my buddy list, I start a chat room and mentally type, “We can talk through this when I don’t want people thinking I’ve gone totally insane.”
“Sure,” Ada says and flies closer to my right shoulder. “We’ll play along with that deception if you want.”
“I think she should’ve been the devil,” Mitya says in Russian in the IM window. “That Bedazzle movie got the gender right.”
“You look more natural when horny,” Ada says out loud.
I snicker at Mitya’s dumbstruck expression, then mentally type, “Ada learned Russian.”
The angel giggles as the devil mutters Russian and English curses under his breath.
“So,” I type into the chat, “what app are you working on next?”
“You guys already have a basic face
recognition app,” Mitya says out loud. “Your mom even used one. Ada is working on tweaking the app to pull data from a backend that Alex, the guy I mentioned earlier, provided. He helped us get access to Vkontakte and other popular Russian social network platforms, and he’s now trying to get us access to all the major Russian criminal databases—a perk of having good connections.”
Something clicks in my brain, but before I can say anything, Ada says, “I’ll expand it to show you more data than what your mom would’ve had access to. Our work will take some time, and I think you should spend that time sleeping.”
“She’s right,” Mitya says. “Eastern Standard is seven hours behind Moscow time. It’ll be early morning when you land.”
Crap. They’re both right. I’ve been too busy to think about jetlag.
“My cousin gave me Ambien,” I say.
“Take it,” Mitya says at the same time as Ada says, “Be careful, those are addictive.”
“Now you guys are getting into your roles,” I say and push the button overhead to summon one of the hot stewardesses.
“I’m going to ask her for food and water,” I find myself needing to explain to Ada.
In the distance, I see the blonder and longer-legged stewardess walk toward me with the grace of a ballerina.
“Just a reminder,” Ada whispers next to my ear. “We can see and hear what you’re doing.”
I ignore Ada and make sure Mr. Spock is hidden as the woman approaches.
The stewardess gives me a thousand-watt smile. “How can I help you, Mr. Cohen?”
“I asked them to call him that,” Mitya types inside the chat.
“Like he wasn’t already full of himself,” Ada responds.
They type more snarky remarks back and forth, but I ignore them as I ask about food and drink. This being Mitya’s plane, I’m not surprised when the stewardess whips out a menu with obscene options that include escargot and lobster tails.