Idempotency

by Joshua Wright

  Dylan also began working again. He’d considered quitting, but his noncompete contract would have made finding another job nearly impossible. So he rationalized his work as trying to ensure a negative experience would never again happen to anyone else (certainly not a customer). Eventually, Dylan’s naturally optimistic nature kicked in and he became himself again. Idempotency had been restored, barely.

  The hardest part, however, had been dealing with Kristina. To her, he was the same man. But to Dylan, he had just lived a life married to another woman, one whom he’d felt an unhealthy amount of enmity toward. To her credit, Kristina had been more supportive than Dylan could have possibly imagined. She waited on him hand and foot, taking a leave of absence from work, and yet she still stayed up all hours of the night pouring over his case, the code, the log files, anything she could get her hands on. Eventually, Dylan was able to recall and feel their friendship again, but feeling love had been much harder to come by.

  Meanwhile, Dr. Wirth and his sizable team, Dr. Graham and his team of psychiatrists, and the entire engineering department had all become engrossed with the Dylan/Dalton conundrum. They had not been able to pinpoint any measurable root cause as to why or where the experience had spun out of control. There were plenty of educated guesses, but educated or not, they were just guesses. Human trials were put on hold while mass amounts of data were being collated and combed. Through it all, the company kept on pitching the sale, assuming the bug would be found and squashed eventually.

  After nearly half a year had passed since his deathTrip, Dylan was healthy enough to go back to his role as a business-development specialist. His first job had been the EGC sales pitch.

  Dylan was suddenly the most important man in the company, and the higher-ups knew it. He was given a bonus and a raise and in return asked (though, in truth, it was a requirement) to sign a new and more restrictive noncompete, which he did.

  The only issue Dylan couldn’t get past was Sabrina. He thought about her incessantly. He couldn’t grasp the fact that she had never existed. He didn’t—wouldn’t—believe it. He knew logically that she was merely a figment in the ether; a collection of 1s and 0s that formed a structure based off of feedback from Dylan’s subconscious; and yet he believed deep within his heart that somewhere, in a real place, in a real form, Sabrina must still exist.

  He didn’t admit this to the psychiatrists, of course. He knew doing so would guarantee several more months of intensive therapy. Instead, he shrugged off the topic. After all, he had loathed Sabrina in the end. It was easy for him to convince the doctors that she hadn’t been that important to Dalton in the grand scheme of his life.

  Late one evening, months after Dylan’s ordeal, as the hallway lights in Dr. Wirth’s white office had all died down to a subtle simmer, the doctor received an odd email from SolipstiCorp’s CEO, Jack Carpenter:

  From: Jack Carpenter

  To: Dr. J. R. Wirth

  Subject: client info

  Dr. J I hope this finds you well,

  Soon after you ack reading of this email, you’ll receive a vidchat from our most prominent and pertinent client. He needs answers, and you’ll provide them.

  I realize your instincts in this matter will drive you to be reticent toward answering fully, however, do otherwise. Our client needs to know everything. He’s under full NDA of course. Don’t hold back, doc.

  — JC

  Dr. Wirth squinted in confusion and nearly jumped when a vidChat notification popped into his BUI’s periphery. The doctor’s old wooden chair creaked harshly as he leaned back. He scratched his chin, furrowed his brow, and finally waved his hand to answer the vidChat.

  In front of him, the image of a man’s back came into view. The man stood facing a sprawling view of some city that Dr. Wirth could not place. Low clouds shrouded the tallest buildings in the distance. A subtle mist hung just below the clouds, as if gravity had tired of pushing the rain downward. The man himself appeared tall but hunched over; he clasped his hands behind his back. The vid image was dark, but the doctor was surprised to notice graying hair upon the man’s hanging head.

  “Dr. Wirth, thank you for seeing me at this late hour.” Coglin spoke with a gravelly voice.

  “Of course, Mr . . . .” Dr. Wirth’s voice hung in the air like the mist the old man stared out upon.

  “I understand there’s been trouble with a recent trial subject—a Mr. Dylan Dansby. Correct?”

  “Yes.” Dr. Wirth paused. If he wasn’t going to get any information, he would at least make his mystery client work for information.

  “Tell me, Doctor, was idempotency . . . restored in this case?”

  Dr. Wirth chose his words carefully, until settling on: “Idempotency is a philosophical theory. I deal with science. We’ve separated Dylan’s memories and his sense of self appears to be . . . relatively . . . back to where it should be.”

  The old man cleared his throat, which seemed to lead to a subtle cough. “And, if he lived the same life again, in another deathTrip? The life of Dalton, a second time over—would idempotency be more or less likely to be sustained?”

  “Less. Certainly.” The doctor hesitated, then recalled his CEO’s words to not hold back. “I fear for Dylan’s general psyche should he go under another deathTrip in a different life. If, however, he were to deathTrip once more as Dalton . . . I believe the Dylan we know would cease to exist. His mind would become malleable—no, more than that—liquefied. His sense of self would become a blank canvas.” He took a deep breath, adding, “Unless, of course, we can figure out what went wrong in the first place.”

  “Of course,” the old man replied quickly. He turned his head slightly toward the camera, then added, “And you have no leads in that area, as yet?”

  “No.” Dr. Wirth looked down at his desk, away from the old man’s surreptitious gaze. Then, with confidence, he said, “We’ve taken great care to ensure idempotency is sustained in our deathTrip process. We write memories only to extremely specific and safe portions of the brain that we know to be nearly unused. We naturally tested Dylan’s mental physiology beforehand and there were no signs of anything out of the ord—”

  The old man began to laugh. “You don’t have to convince me, Doctor. I’m certain you all have the most benevolent of intentions.” He was still chuckling when he began to cough. He unclasped his hands and leaned on something off screen to steady himself. The fit passed, and he breathed inward, a raspy breath. At last he said, “Thank you, Doctor. You’re doing fine work. Keep it up.”

  The vidChat winked out, and Dr. Wirth was left staring at his desk, wondering what exactly that had all been about.

  Part 2

  —ancient Tamil/Indian proverb

  Chapter Sixteen

  Sindhu was determined and persistent, a solid combination. It hadn’t taken her more than a few days to compile a list of hundreds of darkVirt locations. She received the first from another anonymous realWorld encounter at the decibelityFactory. After that, finding more locations became a cinch. She had already gained a reputation as a respected contributor to several popular open-source software projects, and now that her alias was floating among the darkVirts, she found that several important people were now seeking her out, rather than the other way around. She was now routinely virtTripping every night after her day job; virtually hobnobbing with the technically elite in the dark underbelly of the darkVirts. She hadn’t, however, let on about her intentions of finding SOP just yet, nor had she aired her extreme progressive views on the striated classes. She didn’t want to lose any friends, nor make any enemies, just yet.

  Most meetings Sindhu took part in focused on the open-source software that powered the multiVirts: the Buoyant project. To keep up appearances, Sindhu had checked in hundreds of thousands of lines of code. It had been a trivial effort, yet her contribution rate exceeded that of the next most active participant by 20 percent. Initially, her fellow darkVirt anonymous code
rs had claimed that Sindhu was merely contributing superfluous code for the sake of getting credit. As the leads of the project soon discovered, however, this was hardly the case. Sindhu wrote efficient code. Her stock skyrocketed, and everyone wanted SinTh3t!c working on their project.

  On her first virtTrip, she had taken part in an anonymous developer conference held on the surface of the sun. A platform levitated around an ocean of photospheric activity. Lava bursts towered unconscionably high around the hundreds of virtual guests at the conference. Most at the event took this in stride, having traveled to this darkVirt previously. Sindhu had trouble containing her awe. Though simply virtTripping from the comfort of her own bed, the view she had taken in was virtually composed from actual cameras that circled the surface of the sun; the brightness had been tuned down, of course. The experience was transcendent.

  A few of the more observant in the crowd at the event had noticed Sindhu’s childlike awe and chided her as a virtNoob. Sindhu did not take kindly to this moniker, and soon began bottling up her amazement. This had been difficult the next few nights as she experienced virtTrips ranging from the surface of Mars, a single blade of microscopic grass, the back of a comet, and—Sindhu’s vote for most original—within a two-dimensional black-and-white world.

  After a few weeks of dizzying darkVirt experiences and tiresome virtual social gatherings, Sindhu had developed a trusted confidant. An older man (or so his virt representation appeared) who was rumored to have been an early coordinator of darkMultiVirts and frequent OSS contributor. He agreed to meet her in a darkVirt at the Vatican one lazy Sunday afternoon. They met, appropriately, in a confessional booth.

  “Sindhu, you don’t find SOP. They find you. And if you’re looking for them, you can be sure they already know it. Other people might know it, too. I’d try to keep quiet about it for a while,” spoke the old man through a small window in the darkened booth. It smelled of musk, but this was only the darkVirt tricking their senses.

  “So SOP does exist!” Sindhu remarked.

  “Of course, Sin. Where there’s smoke . . .”

  “There’s Simeon.”

  After she peppered her elder confidant for what seemed an eternity, he finally gave in, vaguely agreeing to put some feelers out for her. Whatever that meant.

  Several weeks passed and Sindhu was becoming disenchanted. She had followed up with her new friend daily, but each time he gave her only a virtual shrug in return, saying he had done as much as anyone could possibly do and she needed to be patient.

  Patience was not one of Sindhu’s virtues.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Selling products had never before been a problem for Dylan Dansby. In the past, he could have been asked to sell the most innocuous, unsubstantial item ever invented and Dylan would have taken the task on as a challenge, a game to coercing his customers into wanting something so badly that they had to have it right away. He instilled lust into his prey, a carnal desire to gain advantage (be it power, prestige, or personal enjoyment) by obtaining an item that outshined competitors because of its superior quality, uniqueness, or unrivaled value. After Dylan was through with them, his customers would have no choice; they would covet the product and stop at nothing to obtain it. And Dylan would revel in every minute of it.

  At least, that was how it used to be.

  These days, he was suffering from a serious case of salesperson anemia. He was attempting to sell one of the most buzzworthy products he’d ever been associated with, and yet he was having trouble keeping an unstrained face when talking about the wonders of living an alternate life. The negativity toward his own personal experience was palpable.

  It had been months since Dylan had had any contact with Nimbus, Simeon, or anyone of any recondite nature, for that matter. He had done hours upon hours of research, careful to use public networks, heavily encrypted. Kristina had worked with him, as a friend.

  Together they had pieced together a picture of SOP from the most consistent of the various rumors and innuendoes flooding the corpNets and darkNets.

  The most credible account that Dylan stumbled upon centered on a popular anonymous virt that had gained notoriety a decade past before the term darkVirt had even been coined. Known as the assembleMultiVirt, the virt was empowering anonymous, virtual, and peaceful assembly for protests against various corporations. Soon after launching, private information about various corps was streaming through the assembleMultiVirt in waves; employees and customers began feeling a sense of informational freedom that had not been allowed for decades. The assemblies began to garner national news attention.

  The nadir of these events occurred when one particular financial corp on Wall Street, named TinSureCorp, which specialized in long-term striated US treasury and bond insurance, was found to be corrupt almost entirely through the efforts of a dozen anonymous whistle-blowing employees who had met within the assembleMultiVirt. The company had been buying their own insurance on various bond assets through a wholly owned subsidiary. They would then use a second wholly owned subsidiary corp to purchase a specially timed wave of bonds, causing a currency fluctuation. As the currency moved a fraction of a percent, the TinSureCorp customers would come calling, themselves included. Ultimately, none of this would have made a difference, netting out at zero, except for the fact that TinSureCorp was subsidized partly by the US government. As insurance was paid, TinSureCorp collected a small fraction of generous taxpayer assistance.

  No one knew who the TinSure “Twenty Whistlers” (as they had become known) were, but through their collaboration within the assembleMultiVirt, they were able to discern exactly how the shenanigans were being parlayed. TinSureCorp was brought before Congress to testify and ultimately died a quick and ignominious death. To the chagrin of the small fraction of society that was paying attention, their CEO dodged jail time, as did the rest of their executives and the board. One upper-level manager was given probation for several months.

  The assembleMultiVirt had been based out of Copenhagen and had skirted US network enforcement due mostly to no one caring. However, after the TinSureCorp scandal, corp IT departments were on high alert. A coalition of corps banded together to file suit against the assembleMultiVirt for acting as a deliberate accomplice to intellectual-property theft. The problem was, once the suit was filed, the Danish authorities didn’t know who to serve it to. assembleMultiVirt management turned out to be untrace, anonymous.

  The physical servers were equally untraceable. A raid on a large warehouse turned up a small, but very advanced, custom router that appeared to be haphazardly loading and balancing traffic from several dozen third world countries. Further investigation turned up similar setups in those node countries. A spiderweb of connections was thoroughly explored by investigators who were paid by the corps filing the suit, but it was all to no avail. Ultimately, the assembleMultiVirt was taken offline, but never was its provenance discovered.

  The anti-darkVirt corp coalition eventually dropped their suit for lack of a target, and redoubled their efforts on lobbying. This lobby quickly placed heavy emphasis on regulating network traffic, as well as noncorp darkTech: hardwired brain and ocular implants. Thus was born the DIA, the Drug and Implant Administration, out of the ashes of the previous DEA. The National Network Security Bureau had already been monitoring all US network traffic prior to the TinSureCorp scandal; but after a few trivial congressional votes, the NNSB was allowed to monitor for darkVirt activity regardless of place of origin. The latter half of that law, disregarding place of origin, had been a monstrous and mostly tacit change to NNSB’s charter, pushed for by the international corps who were part of the anti-darkVirt lobby—the NNSB was now operating worldwide on behalf of international corps. It was due to these fierce regulations that forced darkVirts, as well as darkTech implant creators, firmly underground and out of the eyes of regular consumers.

  Over the coming years, various theories and conspiratorial claims abounded as to who was the creator of the assembleMultiVirt. Dyl
an’s head spun as he read about the possible candidates. They included the decades-long-defunct AFL-CIO operating in some shadow form, several potential brilliant tech hackers who had suffered some kind of falling out with their various corp overlords, sundry overseas corps who may have a grudge against their first world counterparts, and US-based corps. In some of the more extreme conspiracy rants, second or third world governments were even postulated to be the culprits.

  Dylan was fairly certain Simeon had played a part in the nascent stages of the assembleMultiVirt story. While he would have guessed this without any corroborating evidence, he became convinced after several accounts from corpNet reports at the time that cited a key individual from the Twenty Whistlers as having had a virt avatar that “emanated flames from his flesh at all times” within the assembleMultiVirt. Rumors also laid claims to the individual having a laugh that mimicked “a hyena, high on sulfur hexaflouride.”

  Life imitates art—indeed, thought Dylan.

  After Dylan returned from an uneventful business trip to Turkey, the holidays jumped up on him, attempting to pass as quietly as the moon on a stormy night. On Christmas morning, which happened to fall on a Sunday, Dylan had awakened as he would have any other weekend. His coffee was freshly brewed at precisely 9:00 a.m., the food dispenser chose pancakes (it recalled Dylan’s fondness for pancakes from his past few Christmases, unbeknownst to him), and his media wall was peppering him with dozens of multidimensional feeds from across the corpNets. If it hadn’t been for the various parades and celebrations, he surely would have missed Christmas altogether. Reluctantly, Dylan acquiesced to social conventions, and pulled himself out of his Sunday stupor long enough to visit a few close friends, and an aunt and some cousins who lived in L.A., which happened to constitute almost all of the family he had left.

  He even visited his great-uncle. Randall Dansby was now being housed in a full-time care facility in Santa Barbara. The scrambled trueElderly led a simple life, and was now aging naturally. Doctors estimated that without assistance he would die within the year. What remained of the Dansby family, particularly Dylan’s aunt, felt this course of action to be the most compassionate for the confused man.