by Paul Anlee
According to her calendar, she was in Shanghai helping to plan the megafactory that would churn out a million Cybrids a year for the next twenty years. Then, she was off to Tokyo, Mumbai, and Houston the following week. After that, she’d meet up with Greg in Vancouver and they’d return to Shanghai for the ceremony celebrating the completion of the first Cybrids.
As Chief Engineer, she oversaw the teams setting up to manufacture Cybrids and the specialized rockets that would transport them to the asteroid belt. At last report, she’d already had designs in hand for the specialized RAF generators for the rocket propulsion and mass sequestration.
Greg was made Head Scientist in charge of Exotic Matter, which translated to, “anything to do with generating Reality Assertion Fields.”
One of the key selling points of the G26 cooperation agreement had been that humanity would see upfront benefits from RAF technologies used in the project. This week, he was walking the world’s leading physicists through potential RAF configurations for clean energy production.
When he wasn’t designing technologies for the Vesta Project or the citizens of Earth, Greg continued to study the Eater. He still hoped to find some way to halt and reverse its inexorable growth. Though he and Kathy were fully invested in the asteroid colonies, it would be infinitely better not to lose the other 99.9% of humanity the project wouldn’t be able to save.
Greg’s work took him deep into the parts of his own concepta that were most closely associated with Darian’s memories and the physics of reality.
Following Darian’s own thinking so closely in these areas made Greg particularly susceptible to the thought fragments his mentor had placed all over the internet. It was a battle to think and to maintain an independent personality at the same time.
Kathy didn’t seem to be as badly affected, maybe because she’d been able to cut off Darian’s transmissions to her mind faster than Greg, the day their boss disappeared. Maybe it was because her work was less intricately involved with the science and more with its application. Maybe it’s because she’s female and her brain’s wired differently. He really had no idea.
He was, episode by episode, learning to deal with the daily battles between his own remembrances and those of his mentor. It was a little easier now that he had a vague understanding of what was happening to him. But he still occasionally found himself halting midsentence in a conversation while a dinner-time chat between Darian and his father a decade ago replayed before his senses as if they were right there in the room with him.
To the other scientists in his group, the seemingly random fugue states were a pressing concern. Greg could tell he was rapidly losing their trust. Like I don’t see you whispering!—he fretted. If only you knew what I was dealing with. If you had to function through this, you’d cut me some slack.
He’d booked three days away from the lab and education duties. Enough already. If I don’t figure out how to better integrate Darian’s memories with my own, it’s going to erode my credibility and authority, and jeopardize the whole bloody project. And if this project fails, nobody survives.
He was exhausted, but ready to confront the intrusive memories and attempt to integrate the fragments of Darian that were still resident in unexpected places on the web.
He hoped his own personality was strong enough to remain dominant. What if I can’t do it? What if I lose to Darian’s personality? Would I become Darian? Wouldn’t Kathy be in for a rude surprise if someone who looks like me but acts like Darian welcomes her home!
Greg had been thinking about this a lot lately, ever since Darian attempted to download himself into their minds.
What part of us is really “us”? The question, usually best contemplated over beer, had assumed an urgent importance to him these past few weeks. Is our identity tied up in our body, the way we look, move, and feel? Or is it connected to our brain? What if we keep the same wetware but run a different program on it? I guess that wouldn’t be completely the same brain; some synaptic connections would have changed.
Kathy’s team members were pondering similar questions as they prepared the way for human uploads into the Cybrids. Would the Cybrids receive a copy, or would something original be transferred? Did imprinting the memories, beliefs, and tastes of someone onto a Cybrid lattice create a new person or just copy an old one? What kind of rights could, or should, that personality have?
Kathy modeled the knowledge and beliefs, the concepta of a person, separate from their memories, preferences and experiences, their persona. It was a tidy way of thinking of it, and of organizing the structures in the Cybrid brains.
It wasn’t a completely accurate representation of the messy human mind, but it was close enough for a working framework. Right now, that was all they had time for.
Is there something else, something non-physical we haven’t captured—Greg wondered. Perhaps a soul is the essence of who I am. The thought made him chuckle. Darian certainly didn’t believe so, never had.
Darian’s memories have been trying hard to imprint themselves on my brain. If his soul were out there, he’d only have to bump my soul aside and take over my body. But if his memories and preferences can find a place beside mine, inside the same brain, will it change me? Are we nothing more than memories and preferences? Is my desire for chocolate over strawberry ice cream a defining part of me, the real me?
Greg sighed, seeing through his mental meanderings for what they were. Procrastination. Drifting like this—cosmic navel gazing his grandfather used to call it—was bringing him no closer to any meaningful answers. He was delaying the inevitable confrontation. In a few minutes or a few hours, it would all be over, anyway.
Trying to accommodate another whole person inside his head, was uncharted territory. Sure, there were many documented examples describing multiple personalities and dissociative identity disorder throughout the psychology literature. The condition was generally ascribed to a failure to integrate various aspects of identity, memory, and consciousness into a single complete persona.
What if the condition could be resolved with a simple boost of processing power?
No one had ever possessed the considerable processing and memory space available to someone with a lattice. Then again, no one had ever tried to host two complete personas before, let alone attempt to integrate them into one new person. He hoped his lattice was up for the challenge.
Time to get on with it.
He drew a long breath in, and let it out slowly as he closed his eyes. He adjusted his cross-legged position, propped pillows beneath his knees, and made himself comfortable. He knew that was irrelevant. He could be standing, sitting, or lying anywhere, doing anything, to begin. He found the meditation position calming. If nothing else, it provided some level of reassurance in light of the strong probability that he was about to lose conscious muscle control.
Greg dropped his barriers to the outside world, deactivated his filters and virus scans, and let his mind wander. If there was anything out there that might resonate with internal fragments of Darian, he would just let it happen.
At first, there was no real change. I’m still me—he thought. It was as if the memory fragments on the internet became calm once the barrier that resisted them was removed.
Memories started trickling in, strange pieces of associations. A fork with a few spaghetti strands, the smell of garlic, a smile, a laugh, a Partial differential equation, a droning voice, equations in Hilbert space. The trickle became a steady stream, and then a torrent.
His dendy lattice was flooded with odd associations, smashing into his own concepta in no particular order, demanding to be connected into a coherent whole.
Memories of a baseball game at Fenway clashed with a cricket match by a teahouse on the north end of Mumbai. That’s my memory, one from the original me—he declared.
A summer day at the beach overlapped with a spiritual cleansing in the Ganges.
He remembered his father’s last breath in an Oakland hospital—No, Daria
n’s father. My dad is still alive.
He recalled the voice of his Uncle Nick—no, Darian’s Uncle Nick—the first time he reverently told him—no, Darian— about his mom’s research.
He saw himself programming an optico-chemical DNA synthesizer to produce the modified genome of some virus. An entire degree’s worth of synthetic biology slammed into place in Greg’s brain, followed by classified files on methods for growing dendy lattices in insects and animals.
He relived Darian’s fury at being told his entire PhD Thesis had been classified Top Secret. He heard his dad arguing angrily with his Uncle David when he learned how Sharon’s shares in Neuro Nano had been diluted to almost nothing.
He remembered his father’s shame—no, both of their fathers’ shame—at being unable to provide a financially secure future for their sons.
As Darian’s life reassembled itself from the fragments that had been scattered across the web, Greg felt a schism developing. He worked feverishly to assign memories to Greg or to Darian, to keep the two separate. He fought to compartmentalize the two unique individuals within his one body. Greg’s. Darian’s. Darian’s. Greg’s.
This isn’t going to work—he realized. At best, I’ll be non-functional; at worst, completely and certifiably insane.
Keeping the two personalities separate was not the answer. I need to stop fighting him. Recognition was as good as acceptance. The barrier between himself and Darian weakened. What Darian knew, what Greg knew, what each remembered of the lives they had lived, merged.
He saw only his dads, plural. His degrees, his home towns, his many and varied researches, his ideas. All of it was his. A memory of Kathy’s face floated before him. It was a proud day when he interviewed her for the postdoctoral fellowship. Together with Greg and Larry, they were going to be a great team. It was odd to feel like some paternal mentor toward three scientists who were all older than him.
No!—the part of his persona that was still uniquely Greg intervened. I will not lose this—he declared.
Kathy was not some protégé; she was the love of his life. If that part of Darian needed to be discarded outright so he could hold onto that love, he would prune back Darian’s memory, the feeling of mentorship, ruthlessly.
Maybe there was another way.
He strengthened his own memory of the attraction he felt the day he first met Kathy into outright love at first sight. He tossed aside the small sexual attraction Darian had experienced and replaced it with a fantasy he constructed of Darian’s matchmaking. He imagined fondly remembering how Darian arranged for him and Kathy to be together at every opportunity.
Before long, he could no longer discern what had been true from the edited construction. Greg loved Kathy and she loved him, and Darian loved that he had helped bring the two of them together; it was one of his finest projects ever.
Greg/Darian smiled and breathed easily. He remembered everything, all of the biology, physics, politics, and business. It was all there. He remembered his triumph when he’d first activated his own internal RAF generator, validating his theories. He’d have to make sure to grow one of those in this new body.
Maybe he would make some other useful adjustments while he was at it. Kathy would appreciate a moderately more athletic appearance, perhaps with less facial hair.
He thought back to the night when he’d first generated a simple, sputtering microverse. He was so excited to tell Kathy and Greg that he’d forgotten all about his investigations into the peculiar relationship between Larry and Pratt. He’d forgotten about the inexplicably tight security in the main system of the Yeshua’s True Guard Church.
He remembered racing to the lab and finding Larry already there, ahead of him. He recalled feeling surprised and confused at seeing that Larry already had the device working.
He remembered being trapped inside a shrinking gray microverse while an ever-larger Larry laughed and ranted about the injustices he’d suffered. He remembered struggling to understand what was happening and trying frantically to reverse it. He remembered accepting that he was going to die, and pouring the contents of his lattice, his mind, into the internet so that something of his work might remain.
Greg’s eyes sprang open. Larry! Larry killed Darian!
So what happened to Larry? Where did he go? Darian had been investigating a suspicious relationship between Larry and Pratt. Did Larry flee to Pratt’s?
And how did the gray microverse sphere that trapped Darian change into the Eater?
Could Darian still be alive in there somewhere? I have to tell Kathy—he thought.
He swung his legs off the edge of the bed, stood up, and crumpled to the floor. He’d been sitting cross-legged for hours. All feeling in his legs had left long ago.
Outside, the afternoon sun had given way to darkness. As he lay on the floor, feeling pins and needles while the blood returned to his tingling muscles, he rethought his plan.
Larry had been gone for months; there was no sign or word of him. His new understanding of the origins of the Eater didn’t bring him any closer to solving the threat it posed.
If Kathy learns what I’ve done today, she’ll kill me; we made a pact.
He knew the risks before he began, that he might find his own personality supplanted by Darian’s or locked in permanent battle. He’d risked his life and sanity, and had come that close to forgetting that he loved her. She would not easily forgive that.
As it was, nothing had really changed. They had their love. They had their jobs. The Eater was still a threat.
True, he’d be better able to carry out his duties now. Darian’s fractured soul would no longer torture his every thought. He might even be able to figure out a way to help Kathy. Maybe he could hunt down fragments of association on the net and delete them. If he acted carefully, she’d never need to know why the severity and frequency of attacks diminished. Life would just get easier for her. For both of them.
In the meantime, he’d order a copy of the viral DNA he—as Darian—had used to construct an internal RAF generator. After a year or two, he would order the same for Kathy. Without the need for an external generator, they’d be like gods. They’d be able to change the laws of nature at a whim, and generate different universes with a thought.
Greg nodded to himself and smiled. That’s what I’ll do.
33
The door to the cell opened and a distinguished-looking, older gentleman strolled in.
He took stock of the narrow, creaky bed, metal sink, toilet, small desk, and one utilitarian chair that vied for floor space.
The detainee was stretched out atop the thin covers of the bed. One arm draped across his eyes to block out the light streaming through the single high, narrow window. Sensing the visitor’s presence, he straightened his arm, pushed himself upright, and swung his skinny legs over the edge of the iron bed frame. He rested his hands on his knees, and eyed the older man pulling the chair away from the desk and turning it to face the bed.
The prisoner’s sallow face was tacked in place by two dark, sunken eyes beneath thin eyebrows. Two days of stubble gave contour to a defiant chin. He watched the visitor gingerly lower himself onto the hard, wooden seat.
He favors his right hip—he noted.
The old man looked at the prisoner in silence for several seconds, chewing on a number of possible openings. Sizing up the man staring back at him, he settled on his strategy, and let out a sigh.
“You have not represented us well, Mr. Trillian.”
John Trillian scoffed. “Do you mean, by getting caught?”
The visitor laughed. “My, you are a rebellious one, aren’t you?”
“I have only our Lord Yeshua as an example,” Trillian replied.
“You see yourself in any way comparable to the Messiah?”
“No. Although, my actions against the merchants and the money lenders are inspired by Yeshua’s own.”
“Hmm,” the older man considered the claim, and stroked his chin thoughtfully. “So you
view yourself as a righteous crusader against the immoral establishment? That seems rather…ordinary, don’t you think?”
“Very few have struck at its evil heart as effectively as I have.”
“That is true. You have been a thorn in their side,” the older man conceded. He rubbed his right knee.
“These places are so cold. Are you comfortable here?”
Surprised by the change in tone, Trillian sputtered, “I’m comfortable enough.”
The visitor stood and walked around to the other side of the chair. He grasped the chair’s back and flexed his knee. “It was a long walk down here, and my joints aren’t what they used to be,” he apologized.
“How deep in trouble am I, sir?” Trillian asked, a hint of contrition seeping into his voice.
“You know who I am?”
“Yes, sir. You are Reverend Alan LaMontagne, Head of Yeshua’s True Guard Church. I’ve listened to all your sermons. ”
LaMontagne frowned at the prisoner. “Then that should give you some idea of the trouble you’re in.”
“Not really, sir. Nobody has mentioned any charges yet. I’m not exactly sure what they know.”
“Oh, they know plenty.” LaMontagne pulled his cell phone from his pocket, put on a pair of reading glasses, and scrolled the screen.
“Let’s see. Espionage, identity theft, financial theft, cybercrime and, my favorite, access to national secrets…in several nations.” He regarded Trillian over his glasses. “You have been busy, haven’t you?”
“All of my activities were in keeping with the teachings of our Lord, Yeshua, to expose the ways the rich and powerful have plundered the common people while lying to them out of both sides of their mouths. The meek shall inherit God’s Kingdom on Earth.”
Trillian’s protest was met by LaMontagne’s stony stare.
“Except for the last of these, your crimes are of little interest to the Church,” LaMontagne admitted. “We do not share your view of the moral superiority of your actions. You may see yourself as some modern day cyber-version of Robin Hood. This Administration regards you as a pest to be swatted down. Nothing more.”