by Dhtreichler
“But you haven’t denied it.” Jerome follows up.
“Ask me a question I can answer without giving insights to our competitors and I will answer it. I’ve probably gone too far by explaining why we see a new market and how that is different from our traditional product suites.”
“A new species of man isn’t a product suite.” Jerome isn’t going to take my answer.
“I’m not a new species. I’m the same as you, well, not you specifically. More like Keesha.” I wait for the laughter to subside. “Anyway, we’ve already established that I’m just a girl who got a new lease on life because a group of docs came up with a new way of allowing me to survive. At the moment this is only a medical treatment and not a revolutionary change in the balance of mankind.”
“Then why aren’t we hearing the stories of the others who were dying and now have a new lease on life?” Jerome sure is persistent and has good questions, I have to admit.
“You didn’t hear about me for thirty days after I transitioned because of confidentiality.” A weak response that will just ping pong back to me. “But you have to put this all into perspective. Dr. Woodall was more than a year away from what he thought was the first transition when I came to his attention. He knew he wasn’t ready, but he also knew I wouldn’t live long enough to be around when he was. So he went ahead and transitioned me to keep me alive knowing he would be changing the tires as we move on down the highway now. This body wasn’t ready. I’ve had several updates just to get me to the point where I can have this conversation with you. Dr. Woodall is being cautious. He’s told me that. Wants to make sure others don’t have to go through what I have.”
“Like what?” Keesha asks.
“Like this body was built for a guy. That’s just the way it was. His team made the assumption the first to transition was most likely going to be a guy, so that’s the equipment it came with.” Hopefully this will change the subject.
“You don’t look like no guy.” Keesha fires back.
“Not only did I have the wrong plumbing, but I also was insensitive in a lot of ways. That wasn’t just because I didn’t have the proper sensors, but the programming was designed to react in a way that was inconsistent to what I used to do, or how I thought. Dr. Woodall and his team have done a fantastic job of making changes as we go, but I’m still not there.”
“If you were seventy percent when you transitioned how far along are you now?” another journalist asks. Her name and credentials come into view.
“Roxanne, thanks for your question. I would have to say maybe seventy-two percent.”
“How many updates have you had?” Keesha asks.
“Three.” I respond simply.
“In a month?” Keesha continues. “That’s a lot.” She’s trying to help me out and I appreciate her help in changing the story direction.
“But why haven’t you made more progress?” Roxanne continues her story line.
“Dr. Woodall and his team built their procedures and systems from others who came before them. They were able to stand on the shoulders of pioneers in robotics and robotic medicine. Without all those earlier discoveries I wouldn’t be sitting here. So, while I may have only progressed a couple percent, that is pretty quick when viewed in the century or more that it took to put the knowledge into place that enables me.”
Jane re-enters the discussion, “If Jerome is correct about what AppleCore is doing to corner the market in immortals then there is definitely a concern that should extend beyond just AppleCore’s competitors.”
I thought I was done with both Jane and Jerome’s questions. Guess not. I look about the room. There are still lots more questions to come, so I decide appeal to the desires of the other journalists for their stories. “Why do you say that, Jane?”
“Because it’s like my initial concern. A society of mortals and immortals and never the twain shall meet.”
“Is that against the law?” I ask to frame this discussion.
“Maybe laws need to be put in place to limit what you can do.”
“So, the ACLU would take away my freedoms to ensure others keep theirs?” I say incredulously. “Is that what you’re saying?”
“I’m saying that no one should control you and those who come after you. Not AppleCore, not Google, and especially not Amazon. But then, Amazon probably already has immortals,” she muses.
INTRIGUED
I work through the night in my Condo. I’m not feeling like I’ve done a very good job in my press relations. Probably need to get someone from AppleCore to help me better prepare although I’ve followed the advice I’ve been given in the past. But maybe if someone was there with me, they could better reframe the answers to get to a better result. I’ll have to talk to Suzette Bain who is our external affairs person at AppleCore when I get in. I’ll send her a note now, so she knows what I want to talk about in the morning, even though I know she won’t see my note until then. I compose the note in my head and it is automatically sent.
The review of each of our programs doesn’t take long. As my processors get faster and faster I’m finding I don’t need nearly as much time as I used to. That permits me to dive deeper into the data and send notes to the program and project managers and in some instances right down to those coding the solutions. I always copy the notes up the chain, so everyone knows what I’ve seen and what I’ve requested be done about it. My old teams have gotten used to seeing my mid night notes as they are lovingly referred to. It’s all the new teams that didn’t work with me who seem to freak out when they wake up and find a long stream of emails about various things in their area. When I first started to do this, I got lots of push back. That continued until the recipient did what I asked. Generally, they found it helped them solve a problem before they recognized it, or helped them get past a roadblock. I expect as the whole team gets used to me I’ll have lots less anxiety about my approach to management. For some of the folks I’m sending notes to, they’ve never had a note from the CEO before. Probably always thought I was just some mythical beast, who only comes out to roam the halls at night and eat any programmers who have been working an all-nighter and gotten disoriented from lack of sleep.
I need to reflect on what Dr. Woodall shared with me about A’zam’s plans, but I also need to recharge. So, I head off to the charging bed, leaving a trail of clothes behind me. I wonder if Dr. Woodall’s team will come up with a better approach. Fifteen minutes where I can’t do anything except think is probably not the best use of my time. His engineers are attempting to save as many of the typical behaviors as possible, but just repurpose them. Why couldn’t they recharge me when I’m sitting at my desk? Yeah, I know. The whole thing about the proximity charging needing as little between me and the coil makes it necessary to charge undressed. At some point they will find a way to let us charge wherever.
The charging bed is always cold when I lay down. No different this time. I feel the cold since I have temperature sensors. I remember what it feels like to be cold, even though by body doesn’t react on its own to the cold.
Usually my mind just goes wherever it wants when I lie down. But today I’m trying to see if I can force my mind to focus on what I want it to during this fifteen minutes. I’m thinking about A’zam’s software as I make full contact, but my mind doesn’t stay there. I’m instantly presented with an image. A confusing image. I need to understand what my mind is suggesting to me. The image changes and I can now see I am looking at the back of Rocky’s head. He needs a haircut. But Rocky always needs a haircut. He turns to look at me. A smile, but it’s a typical Rocky smile. A flash of recognition and an almost immediate fade as Rocky returns to whatever problem he is trying to solve in his head. Rocky much prefers his head to a computer. He will even do calculus in his head. Stubborn. He told me he was like his father who didn’t have tools to help him do his work. He had to learn the math. And that gave him a big advantage, because he wasn’t simply presenting a solution the computers had designed for him.
He actually understood the math because he had done it himself. Rocky isn’t as hardcore as his father was. Yes, Grandpa Washington is no longer with us. Died of a broken heart. Uncle Max was stillborn, and Grandma never recovered. Always thought she was responsible. Thought she had done something the baby couldn’t tolerate. Maybe she drank too much alcohol. Maybe she shouldn’t have worked in her garden after a day at work. Maybe she got chilled. Maybe she caught a virus and she just never displayed the symptoms. How was she to know why her child had been chosen to not live? Anyway, she apparently took an overdose of pills and then decided to go swimming in the ocean. Her body was found in Huntington Beach even though she went into the water off Torrance. No one knows how she came ashore so far from where she began. We only knew she went in at Torrance because that was where we found her car and a passer-by remembered seeing her go in when the water was considered to be very cold. A few days after the funeral Grandpa turned up missing. His body was found in a hunting lodge in the Sierra Nevadas. He had apparently been there for a few months when the next renting couple showed up and found him. I’m sure the loss of both of his parents so close together was a major blow to Rocky, although he never talked about them. Anna Laura told me the story when I was about nine. I simply asked her why we only had one set of grandparents when all the other kids at school had two. Of course, no one knew for sure why Rocky’s father died. Anna Laura told me that she simply preferred to think of him as having a broken heart from the loss of both his child and then his wife. He knew, according to Anna Laura, that she had nothing to do with the child being stillborn. She had delivered Rocky without incident. Anyway, Rocky had gone to live with his mother’s brother who had a decidedly jaundiced view of Rocky’s father. Rocky took it as a strength of his father that he insisted on doing everything in his head. But Great Uncle Sam had nothing but bad things to say about the man who had taken his sister away from the family and then was ultimately the cause of her death. Maybe Rocky took it as a personal challenge to be as good as his father, I don’t know. But Rocky left his uncle’s care at seventeen and never returned. He put himself through college, grad school and ultimately a doctorate, all on his own dime. Rocky worked hard to make the money to get his undergrad degree. He worked even harder during the next two because by then he was married to Anna Laura and first I came along followed soon after by Tabitha to add to his burdens. But Rocky never complained. He still never complains. Life gave him a hand of cards and it was up to him to figure out not only what to do with the cards, but how to play them. Maybe that’s a family trait. Since I pretty much did the same thing. I left for college and never returned to live with him. I paid for my undergrad degree from my earnings doing random jobs until I got into grad school and got my internship at AppleCore. While Rocky never admitted doing anything to help me get that internship, he was a long time AppleCore employee by that time. He knew people. I’m sure he did something to give me a chance, but every time I asked him about it he denied any knowledge. It always seemed to me there was someone there looking out for me. Someone who was willing to give me the benefit of the doubt. Even though I had lots of doubts myself. And while I am fascinated by software and systems, it took a long time before it became a passion. And I’m still not sure how my initial interest in sales and marketing turned into the hard sciences and technical solutions. Was that Rocky working behind the scenes? Was he talking with the technical folks he knew about giving me an opportunity to show what I could do? I don’t know, but it seemed that every assignment at AppleCore took me deeper and deeper into technical solutions. I remember asking once if I could do a tour in marketing and was told I shouldn’t waste my time. That was where the engineers who had no vision went. Those who could understand and explain what is rather than envision what isn’t and blaze a trail to make it a reality. If Rocky was behind it he hid it well. I’d ask my mentors if they ever talked with Rocky about what I was doing. All professed innocence. Rocky was very good at seeming ignorant and uninterested in what I was doing. But there was one time when I said something about a particularly difficult problem I was working on and he instantly suggested a solution even though I just referenced the nature of the problem and not the specifics. Of course, his approach worked and saved me weeks of trial and error. Rocky is good at what he does. No question.
The timer vibrates the bed to let me know I’m fully charged. I lay there for a few moments thinking through why this particular set of memories was triggered today. Had I seen something that made me think of the back of Rocky’s head? Or was it just the fact I will never bear a child had sunk in and that triggered the remembrance of Uncle Max and Great Uncle Sam? Or maybe it was Rocky telling me that I am barely human. Or maybe that I recognized he had a rough childhood because he lost the people most important in his life twice. I don’t know why, nor am I likely to figure it out.
I get up full of energy, at least my batteries are. But what about A’zam? That was what I wanted to think about in my fifteen minutes of captivity to a magnetic coil. As I walk across the room, picking up the discarded clothes it occurs to me that I need to create a holistic map of what I’m finding out about A’zam and his clandestine agreements. I know he has worked deals with all the major suppliers of the immortal body we both have. He has options to buy most if not all of them by now. So AppleCore will benefit from every immortal body built until Dr. Woodall and his successors start second sourcing systems and components. Dr. Woodall spoke of teaching the procedure to other doctors to speed the rate of transitions. But A’zam would not want that. He would want to control how many and who transitions so the competition and those he finds undesirable can’t become immortal.
In this scenario does AppleCore become the Trojan Horse? We transition our employees in each country of interest and once they are up to speed, they begin to take over the governments of those countries? Then AppleCore becomes the backbone of a new world order, one dominated by A’zam and those who follow his instructions since his software limits their choices.
A quick shower and shampoo, and then I select from the clean outfits in my closet one that is suitable for the agenda of the day. I dress myself as I let my mind continue to work the issue. The problem is I am only speculating. A’zam may have an entirely different objective. Smaller and more focused on market domination, not world domination. But I recognize his ego would automatically take him in the world domination direction if left unchecked. So, what could possibly serve to check his ego? I’m not aware of anything. Maybe I should have a conversation with Dr. Woodall about A’zam. I’m not sure what he would be willing to tell me, but maybe he could provide insights that might be helpful.
I try to imagine how Dr. Woodall would build the software A’zam has contracted. I know almost immediately how I would build it, but we come at the problem from totally different directions I would assume. I wonder if I could get Dr. Woodall to subcontract that project to me. Let me develop it. Maybe I could find a way to make it conform to A’zam’s specifications and yet find a way to give immortals a chance of regaining control over their lives under certain circumstances. I’ll have to think about this further. Jermaine is scheduled to transition today. I wonder if I can present him with the problem. See what he thinks once he has his advanced mental prowess. Jermaine has always come up with novel approaches to some of the hardest design problems even when I was pushing the teams way out of their comfort zones. He’s actually more imaginative than Oriana, although she’s better at organizing and holding her teams accountable.
A little cologne and I’m presentable for the day.
Once outside I instantly start looking at my roses. I call up the information on each one, noting the differences, which have certain characteristics that would put them into my ideal rose garden. Why am I creating an ideal rose garden in my head? I didn’t realize until just now what I am doing. Why did I unconsciously decide to create a paper ideal rose garden? Maybe because I’ve been thinking of Anna Laura off and on throughout the night. Even if i
ncidental to my thoughts about Rocky. She had a rose garden. I took care of it, sort of, after her passing. I have no idea what kinds of roses they were. I really didn’t want to be tied down to something that was so painful to me, conjuring up her memory every time I went out the back door. Seeing her in my mind’s eye trimming, weeding and pruning her garden of colors, scents and buzzing bees. Am I trying to please her by creating the ideal rose garden courtesy of my super brain, as opposed to her likes and preferences? I have no idea how she chose the roses she grew. She never discussed them. Never once told me what kind was what. Maybe she just reacted to my indifference. If I’d acted interested even once would she have spent the time to teach me what she knew of roses? I have to think she would have.
And Tabitha. What did she think about Anna Laura’s garden? I don’t remember her spending time there. Never saw her pruning or weeding. That was Anna Laura’s exclusive domain. I’m not sure Rocky even knew there were flowers, let alone roses, out in the backyard. He only ventured out there to grill something, which he always overcooked according to Anna Laura. She liked medium well done. However, Rocky always seemed to blow right past that. His criteria was digital: raw and cooked. And cooked was all the way through. Pink in the middle? That’s raw to Rocky.
But back to the rose garden. Do I care about roses now that I know I’m trying to atone for being a horrible daughter to Anna Laura? Yes, I thought I was a horrible daughter. I never cared about the things she cared about. I was Rocky’s daughter more than hers, even though she was the one I was close to. Not that I wanted to be like Rocky, but we were just so alike. And maybe that’s why I rebelled against him after Anna Laura and Tabitha were gone. I was afraid I would live in my mind the way he does. That people wouldn’t be important to me as even I never seemed important to him even though I was all he had left. But remembering Uncle Max, Great Uncle Sam and his parents - they were gone before I was born so I never thought of them as my grandparents. Remembering all of those who shaped Rocky’s life has brought me to a realization. Maybe Rocky pushed me away because he didn’t want to be hurt again. Maybe he was afraid something might have happened to me like everyone else he ever cared about. Especially Anna Laura.