by Hammond, Ray
‘We expect Henry Lampton’s mind to be duplicated within Trans One and to become conscious immediately. That mind will, of course, carry all the knowledge and memories of the procedure which has led to its emergence within a cognitive processor. Full psychological and psychiatric support will be provided but, if that mind demands it, power will be instantly withdrawn and the experiment halted.’
Cummings glanced around the packed room to ensure everyone understood what he was saying.
‘Will you join me now, Henry?’ asked the Mondo CEO, turning around and beckoning to the world-famous author.
Lampton rose and walked to the centre of the stage to stand beside the Mondo boss.
‘I have no idea how the duplicate me will feel,’ began Lampton. ‘One thing I am sure of though is that he will not be me. I shall still be inside my own head no matter who that impostor thinks he is.’
The audience laughed at this lightening of tone, then the author continued with the script.
‘But perhaps he’ll be able to say and more importantly write, what it feels like to be the first human mind running inside a machine. That is my goal in volunteering for this project. To further our knowledge of what it will be like to be a human of the future.’
‘Thanks, Henry,’ said Cummings. ‘But we’re not going to leave things there. If the first stage of our experiment is a success we will have a replica of the phenomenal mind and much-loved personality of Henry James Lampton captured for all eternity in a nanoprocessor – an entity which can be backed-up and duplicated at will. Moreover, even while running a full virtual simulation of a biological body from which to provide Henry’s duplicate mind with bio-feedback, that processor will provide the virtual Henry with mental processing power several magnitudes greater that the biological Henry’s original brain. Remember, all this will be shown live on the web. Who knows what the new Henry will be able to tell us?’
‘It makes my head hurt just thinking about it,’ put in Lampton.
‘The second stage of our project will be to integrate the two Henry Lamptons,’ continued Cummings. ‘If both entities agree, the self-powered Trans One microprocessor containing the duplicate mind will be implanted into Henry’s skull and will be fully interfaced to his cerebral cortex using Mondo’s patented mind-machine interface. The id and locus of the microprocessor mind will be suppressed to allow Henry’s natural sense of self, of locus, to transfer and inhabit an artificial mind in which Henry’s own sense of self should feel entirely at home and wholly secure. In time we anticipate that the real Henry, and his sense of self, will have completed his transfer to the Trans One chip, after which it can be removed from Henry’s redundant body and backed-up. As a result, the great Henry James Lampton will become immortal.’
*
In a darkened room thousands of miles to the east of Mountain View Alexander Makowski sat watching the live feed from the Mondo Corp. press conference. The images webcast from the company’s presentation theatre were displayed on a large wall screen
A few feet away to Makowski’s side sat Professor Bo Lundgren, Director of the CERN particle accelerator. He was seated in an upright chair and his wrists were bound together in a plastic tie behind his back. Behind him stood a young HFDA volunteer, an automatic pistol thrust into his belt.
As the details of Mondo’s plans to upload the famous author’s mind into a computer chip unfolded in all their chilling clinical detail, Makowski put his hand to his heavily-lined brow and shook his head despairingly. When the upbeat and celebratory presentation came to an end the founder and leader of the Humans First Party turned to face the handcuffed man beside him.
‘Professor Lundgren, you see now why we so desperately need your help,’ he began. ‘Most political leaders have already enhanced their biological minds and when they give permission for experiments such as these they are forgetting what it is like to be wholly human. And once firms like Mondo demonstrate that entire human minds can be transferred to machines, it will be the beginning of the end for our species. Companies will give away these little chips just to gain consumer loyalty and advertising revenue. Millions of foolish individuals will upload their minds, selfishly eager to live on forever. It will happen very rapidly, and this world will then be populated by machines, not by humans. It will be a takeover by machines – from within’
The prisoner, who himself was too squeamish to even implant a virtual assistant, swivelled his body to face his captor.
‘You may be right, Makowski,’ he said with a shake of his head. ‘But you cannot use threats and violence to change things. I refuse to help you in any way.’
‘You must help us!’ screamed Makowski, springing to his feet. ‘You have to help us’
‘Never,’ said Lundgren, flinching backwards in his chair, as if expecting a blow.
‘Don’t you understand?’ yelled the Humans First leader as he lent over his seated prisoner. ‘If this world is to be run by machines for machines, it would be better to have no world at all!’
*
June 27th 2047
MONDO DEFIES HFDA THREATS – PREPARES TO UPLOAD FIRST HUMAN MIND
by Basil Snook, chief medical correspondent
In public defiance of the threats issued by the anti-technology terrorist organization the Humans First Party, the Mondo Corporation has announced that it plans to upload the mind of novelist Henry James Lampton to a computer chip. The process is due to begin in the next few weeks and will be shown live in its entirety on the web. The federal Department of Health’s bioethics committee has given special dispensation for this procedure to take place.
The Nobel-prize-winning author said yesterday, ‘No one has the right to dictate how others must live. Despite the threats of the anti-technologists, I fully intend to go ahead with my collaboration with Mondo Transhuman Technologies to upload my consciousness into computer memory.’
Nine
Gary Tipton’s personal communicator had yielded up the name and address of a travel agency office in the centre of Caracas. Under intense and relentless computer-driven interrogation inside the British embassy in Mexico City the hapless would-be HFDA volunteer had confirmed that he had been told to visit the travel company to receive further instructions about how to make contact with the organization.
‘Buenas tardes,’ said Harry Floyd in his best Spanish as he entered the small shop in a narrow side street just off the Avenue Urdaneta. ‘Habla Ud. ingles?’
Perfect, pronounced Maria in his earpiece.
A short middle-aged man with a black pencil moustache, the only person manning the office, rose warily from behind a desk to greet the tall stranger.
‘How can I help you?’ he said in American-accented English.
‘I’m Gary Tipton,’ said Floyd as he unshouldered Tipton’s blue and white back-pack and extracted the man’s passport and biometric ID. ‘I was supposed to be here a couple of weeks ago.’
The man stared hard at Floyd, then past him out of the shop window. Then he nodded once, took the documents and glanced at them without comment. Without further reference to Floyd, the travel agent sat back down at his desk and pulled up a file on his computer. The man compared Tipton’s ID to an image on his computer screen and then glanced at the visitor standing before him. Pulling open a deep drawer, he lifted out a multi-purpose biometric scanner, placed it on his desktop and plugged it into an electrical socket.
Floyd sat on a chair in front of the agent’s desk and watched as the man inserted both the passport and the laminated chip-bearing ID card into the checking device. Within seconds the scanner beeped to confirm the authenticity of the documents.
The travel agent then turned the scanning device towards Floyd. ‘Please insert your finger,’ he said with a small Latin shrug.
Floyd did so, placing his right forefinger into the indentation. The words ‘positive match’ appeared on the scanner’s display.
‘O.K.,’ said the man and, as Floyd removed his hand, he unplugged the unit and returned it to his
desk drawer.
‘What delayed you?’ he asked with a sharp glance upwards at the visitor.
‘I had a car crash on the way down,’ Floyd told him ‘Lost a wheel and went off the road. It too them longer to patch me up than the car.’
The travel agent pinched the septum of his nose between his forefinger and thumb, thought for a moment, then opened another drawer in his desk.
He’s bought it, said Maria quietly.
Pulling out a small red plastic wallet, the travel agent tapped at his computer keyboard. A printer whirred and the man turned and plucked a coupon from a printer that sat on a table behind him.
‘At four p.m. this afternoon there is a bus leaving Terminal del Oriente for Puerto Páez,’ he said opening the wallet and placing the just-printed ticket inside. Then he laid out a small street map showing the location of the bus station. ‘Be sure to be on the bus. The journey will take sixteen hours. You will be met when you arrive in Puerto Páez.’
Floyd studied the map of Caracas city centre. ‘Where’s Puerto Páez?’ he asked.
The man rose from his desk and walked over to an old relief map of Venezuela that hung on the wall. ‘Here, in the far south,’ he said pointing. ‘Where the Orinoco meets the Meta river.’
FARC country, said Maria.
Floyd stepped closer and examined the map. The little town was right on the border with Columbia. To the north was what looked like grassy plains, to the south appeared a range of mountains and a large jungle region. Maria was right. The vast border territory was controlled by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia – FARC – the rebel communist army tacitly supported by the Venezuelan regime, the group that supported and funded Makowski, his Humans First Party and the HFDA.
‘O.K. But I’ve still got my car with me,’ said Floyd. ‘I bought it in Phoenix.’
‘We’ll dispose of it for you,’ said the travel agent.
Straight into his pocket, said Maria.
*
‘Mike, I’ve been trying to track down the other scientists who worked with Phelps on the Indiana Project,’ said Nicole Sanderson as she entered Ryan’s office. ‘But all of the senior people are dead.’
‘Dead?’ echoed the ATA director, surprised. ‘Phelps said the project leader died in a boating accident, didn’t he?’ What happened to the others?’
‘I’m not so sure that Professor Baxter’s death was an accident,’ said Nicole. She issued a command and Carl displayed the physicist’s image onto the office wall screen. ‘The coroner recorded an open verdict. The man was seventy-two and he went out fishing one Sunday morning four years ago – on his own – off Newport Beach, California. His empty boat floated in two tides later. His body wasn’t washed up for three days.’
‘So?’ asked Ryan.
‘The strange thing was that there had been a break-in at his house three weeks before. All Baxter’s computer equipment was taken. His widow tells me he was terribly upset about it because it contained much of his research data.’
‘Upset enough to commit suicide?’ asked Ryan.
‘His wife is certain he would never have done that. They had a holiday in Italy booked for the following week. Plus, the professor had kept back-ups of all his work. He had already bought a new computer system and re-loaded his data.’
‘And where is that data now?’ asked Ryan, sitting forward.
‘It’s on it’s way here as we speak,’ Nicole told him.
‘O.K. So what happened to the others on the Indiana team?’ queried the ATA director.
‘Frederick William Ronson, theoretical physicist on the Indiana Project, died in a car crash in Connecticut,’ said Nicole as Carl flashed up a second image. ‘No other vehicle involved. The Coroner recorded it as an accidental death.’
The images and the histories of senior personnel who had been on the Indiana Project flicked by one after another.
‘Apparent heart attack,’ reported Nicole.
‘Suicide.
‘Murdered during a street mugging.
‘Hit by a truck.
‘Fatal epileptic fit.
‘Stroke.
‘Another heart attack.
‘But this one’s the most worrying,’ she said as Carl showed the image of a four-star general in full dress uniform. ‘General Rodney Stone, former director of secret weapons development at the Pentagon. He was in charge of the Indiana Project. He apparently committed suicide eight years after retiring. His body was found inside a burned out car.’
‘What would be the odds of a group connected like this dying naturally within a few years of each other?’ asked Ryan.
Nicole shrugged. ‘I spoke with a life-policy actuary in an insurance company. He said he would give me odds of ten million to one that such a cluster of deaths of related people would not occur under natural circumstances.’
‘Then you must find out why they’ve been dying,’ ordered Ryan.
Nicole nodded.
‘And do we now have a plain language explanation of how this black hole weapon might actually work?’ demanded her boss. ‘And what the HFDA people might be able to do with it – assuming they’ve got hold of the technology?’
Nicole shook her head. ‘Apart from the fact that it makes tiny black holes, we’ve got no idea. Dr Phelps clearly doesn’t know about any of its detailed workings other than his own speciality – the magnets involved for some type of particle accelerator – and our regular science advisors admit it’s way beyond them.’
Ryan produced a sigh of several levels and blew out his cheeks in a despondent gesture.
‘I’m doing background checks on a high-level physicist from the University of Chicago,’ said Nicole. ‘If he checks out, I’m hoping he’ll sign a National Secrecy Agreement and come down to lend us a hand.’
*
‘Copy yourself and all data back to my system in the office,’ Floyd said quietly to Maria, ‘Then delete and scrub everything on this unit except your core personality. Delete all your local memories up until today. Then download and install the Tipton files.’
‘I’ll have to use the satellite link,’ Maria said in his earpiece. ‘The local network is very patchy. I keep losing signal.’
‘O.K.,’ said Floyd, moving the slim chrome case of his communicator onto his knee beside the bus window where it would have line-of-sight for satellite communication. ‘Let me know when it’s complete.’
For the last three hours the bus had been travelling beside the broad and slow-flowing Orinoco river, at the bottom of a steep-sided ravine. Cliffs rose high into the air on both sides and the river was now widening out into a lagoon. They would soon be coming to the outskirts of Puerto Páez. Maria had tracked their 300-mile journey south across the Venezuelan interior, providing local information privately in Floyd’s ear as they travelled. Progress had been very slow on narrow roads which wound their way around tall mountain ranges and skirted vast swampy plains of tropical grassland.
The overnight bus was crowded and many of the local travellers seemed to be carrying their entire worldly goods. Small livestock were being transported in wooden cages and, up towards the front of the old bus, Floyd had even seen dining room furniture wedged between seats.
It had been an uncomfortable night. As dusk fell the oppressive humidity of the tropics had suddenly given way to a sharp mountain coldness and Floyd had been forced to rummage in Gary Tipton’s back-pack for a sweater.
‘Upload complete. All local data deleted and storage scrubbed. I’ve installed all the files from Tipton’s communicator,’ said Maria. ‘And we should see the town in the next ten minutes.’
Floyd nodded, yawned and glanced at his old army watch. It was almost eight a.m. Despite the jolting of the bus he had grabbed several hours of sleep, his head pressed against the window. It was an experienced soldier’s trick, never knowing when the next chance for rest may come. He even managed to ignore the periodic open-mouthed snoring of a fat elderly woman who sat beside him.
&nbs
p; He had dreamed of his Mondogirl, Maria. After two years of having a virtual assistant present in his consciousness he was now aware of a terrible feeling of loneliness, of being wholly alone inside the cell of his own skull. He also missed his biological Maria, but the virtual personality who had lived within his mind knew him better than any human ever could. She knew all his thoughts. It wasn’t the same to have her talking to him through an earpiece; she was no longer part of him.
Suddenly there was a squeal of brakes. The coach slowed down and came to a shuddering stop.
Floyd raised his head just enough to see over other heads in front of him and out the front window of the coach. There was a party of armed men in the road. They were wearing battle fatigues and in the bright morning sunlight Floyd could see that they were festooned with weapons and gun belts.