Idempotency

by Joshua Wright

  “It’s bullshit, all right,” Simeon grunted. “Anything else?”

  “Well, I found something in the code itself. A code path that would never get executed given the way our current deathTrip simulations are engineered. But, with a few subtle changes to the simulation, this code path could get run.”

  “And if it did?”

  “Well, it’s nothing, really. It just adds a subtle variance to the amount the deathTrip is allowed to operate with the limbic system. The thing is, I couldn’t find who added this code—there’s no revision history of it. IT was again, predictably, unhelpful.”

  “Limbic system. Interesting . . . that controls emotions, depression.” Simeon put his hand to his chin and reiterated, “Interesting.”

  “Exactly. Honestly, if that piece of code was something nefarious, it’s not enough to cause what occurred with Dylan. I think . . .” She hesitated. “I think maybe they forgot to remove that piece of code.” She leaned in toward Simeon and quietly added, “After I asked IT about it, the code was gone the next day. The only history of its removal was a blank time stamp.”

  Simeon chuckled. “That’s proof enough for me.”

  “But what are they trying to do to him? Why are they . . . reprogramming him?”

  “That’s what we’re trying to find out, Kristina. We have some hunches, but nothing concrete.” Simeon stood up abruptly. “I have to leave. You’ve been extremely helpful. Fight the malaise of the everyday, Kristina, and you will hear from us soon. Good?”

  She smiled. “Good.”

  Appearing briefly confused, he added, “Look, be careful. Don’t talk to anyone. SolipstiCorp’s CEO will do anything to make Coglin happy; he wants the sale to NRS to go through. He’s a trillionaire the moment that sale is complete. So no talking.”

  She nodded. He returned her nod slowly and added, “I have to get out of here. Take care, Kristina.” Simeon turned and walked through the back of the café—to where, Kristina had no idea. She sat motionless on her counter stool, adrenaline pulsing through her nervous system. She watched the passersby shuffle through the fog, blissfully ignorant of the goings-on of the rich, yet entirely affected by them.

  And she waited anxiously for her next encounter with Simeon.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Her boundless dark hair had once touched the deepest cavity of her long and slender lower back. It had been one of Sindhu’s defining features, requiring years to cultivate. Even now, as she stood in line with over a hundred other new Titus recruits, Sindhu had a fleeting desire to cry at the recent loss of her flowing locks. And while there were advantages to her now ear-length short hair—especially in the sweltering spring heat of the Mexican inland—Sindhu couldn’t help but feel as though she had lost an appendage; even going so far as to wonder if the occasional headache was merely ghost pain over her lost hair.

  The line she now stood in was moving painstakingly slow. The group was waiting in an industrial loading area, and the large canopy that rose above them provided little respite from the sun’s oppressive heat. The recruits had arrived at the south end of the Titus facility by way of a new magRail rail system, installed for the sole purpose of travel and shipping to the Titus facility. The ride was uneventful, lasting about ninety minutes. The railway began in Guadalajara and traveled northwest, just shy of Jalisco’s state border with Nayarit, deep within the thirsting mountains of the Sierra Madre.

  The only noteworthy observations that Sindhu had made thus far concerned the security surrounding the train ride to the facility. The checkpoints were subtle to the unsuspecting, but Sindhu was neither fooled nor unsuspecting. She noted the treelike protected watchtowers dotting the hills, which, as the train drew closer to the facility, grew more numerous and began forming perimeters. She detected through her upgraded ocular implants a strong wireless diffusion field, blocking all incoming and outgoing data. This train ride had marked the first time she had been unconnected in over five years. Finally, just before they entered the facility’s grounds, the magTrain traversed a mammoth thirty-meter high concrete wall, and then went over a deep ravine that formed an effectively impenetrable geographical boundary. On the other side of the river hundreds of metal towers rose up like thorns, creating a digital fence that continuously decrypted and analyzed over-the-air signals, filtering all incoming and outgoing network traffic, tracking movements on the ground in the immediate area, and overlaying all of it with digital satellite imagery from the heavens above. Titus was a technological fortress, a digital castle.

  Sindhu had been in awe upon initial arrival, for about five minutes, then quickly soured on the experience once the group had left the confines of the train and began waiting to clear the final security hurdle. Even the butterflies she felt had been sweated out of her pores. All Sindhu could do now was pine for her lost hair.

  Just twenty-four hours earlier, SOP had been tipped off about a new batch of recruits heading to Titus. Simeon had a contact within the Mexican government sympathetic to SOP and the plight of the lower class. NRS had applied for a bulk amount of Mexican work visas for employees with Indian citizenship. Simeon and team discerned that NRS was hiring outside of Mexico to further obfuscate their intentions, but this was just a guess—yet another unanswered question to add to the greater riddle. They all agreed the turn of events was serendipitous, as it allowed SOP the perfect opportunity to implant their secret weapon within Titus: Sindhu.

  Sindhu, on the other hand, was justifiably frightened.

  “Simeon, I have doubts. I very well could get caught! How will they not know it is me?” she had asked him.

  Simeon dismissed her quickly. “Sindhu, there are over one billion of your people, and even today yours remains the most pure genetic bloodline. You’ll blend right in.”

  “But what if they do an ocular scan, or even a fingerprint scan as part of their security check?”

  “Not a problem—your new ocImps are supposed to be able to mock any signature we want, and—”

  “Supposed to? Have you verified that they work?”

  “And your fingerprints shouldn’t be on file anywhere.” Simeon paused, then looked upward in confusion before finally adding, “At least, I don’t think so, right?”

  “Not helping,” Sindhu replied flatly. “I don’t think my fingerprints are on file either, but I’m not 100 percent certain. They could have been filed at some point when I was a baby. And the ocImps, are you certain they work?” Her accent seemed to be thickening with her fear.

  “Yes, they are biological software; next-gen stemgineering—stem cells engineered to have gates, and logic—they’re calling it stemgineering two-point-five. Cost us a fortune. Virtually undetectable—”

  “Virtually?” she butted in, but he ignored her.

  “No chance of the body rejecting the implant. It’s the latest and greatest tech. You’ll be fine. Besides, we’ll be watching—”

  “That’s not true. There are no signals in or out of there unless your are on NRS’s corpNet.”

  “Sindhu, relax. The only thing you’ll have to worry about is how many toilets you’ll have to clean. Oh, also—you should cut your hair. It’s too unique. It could give you away on image scans.”

  This was the point where Sindhu had lost her cool. Her abundant, earthly ocImp eyes detected her mood change and matched it by glossing over, becoming entirely pitch-black. Simeon mentioned something about needing to change the settings to ensure her ocImps didn’t react that way, perhaps providing tears instead. She became flushed and her voice quivered with tenable anger as she retorted, “You make me cut my hair, and God willing I will stalk you down like a boar in the woods. When you are snoring in your comfortable bed at night, with your comfortable woman at your side, I will be behind, above, below, and beside you, knife in hand, at the ready—and so help me I will strike down your golden ponytail as if it had personally maimed my own offspring. And I will wear it around my neck as a fashion statement, a trophy, for the rest of my days.”r />
  Everyone in the room had been listening at this point in the conversation. Jay-san had clapped in sarcastic admiration of her fiery will. Nimbus had looked rather disturbed at being included in Sindhu’s mad plan as only his “comfortable woman.” Mitlee and Chicklet were laughing uncontrollably in unison, filling the room with the sweet and irrepressible laughter of teenagers. Grepman had smiled, trying desperately to hide his schoolboy crush. He was not doing a good job at it. Simeon, meanwhile, laughed until he recovered enough to add sternly, “Okay, then, it seems I will need to beef up my security detail, because you are cutting your hair. End of discussion.”

  As she remembered this, Sindhu let out an audible whimper, and a short Indian man in line directly in front of her turned and looked at her inquisitively. Lips pursed, she smiled a thin, gentle smile and wobbled her head from side to side in the Indian tradition, as if to say, Nothing’s wrong, go about your business. The short man smiled back widely and wobbled his head, causing small beads of sweat to zigzag down his dark forehead.

  Nerves began berating her stomach as she realized she was now just one diminutive Indian man shy of the security checkpoint. The tiny man in front of her was called forward, and from what she could see, the checkpoint included a spinning, spherical body scan, followed by entrance into a small room where two official-looking guards sat at a holoTable.

  The initial scan turned out to be innocuous: ten seconds of whirring and whizzing, followed by a pleasant beep indicating no darkTech detected. Sindhu breathed out quietly in relief, then began to pass through several more imposing machines, each running her through a battery of full-body tests. She held her breath patiently through each machine, terrified that her ocular implant would send out signals of some kind. The urge to clench her eyes shut as the large machines twirled around her was near-impossible to fight. However, the expected eruption of bells and whistles never came, and she assumed correctly that she had passed.

  A few steps later she entered one of many small offices set up strictly for security interviews. Two muscularly enhanced, middle-aged security guards wearing simple black uniforms perfunctorily asked her a set of questions as dozens of cameras monitored various facial reactions. The guards seemed entirely uninterested. All of five minutes passed before the more excitable guard (who was decidedly unexcited) stated that all required information had been collected before asking Sindhu to roll up her sleeve.

  “Why?” Sindhu replied.

  “Subcutaneous encryptChip—you’re now employee A-9-8-3-2-4-C-D-1-2-4-dash-E-E-0-1-B,” the unexcited muscleman replied flatly. “The chip monitors your vitals at all time.”

  “And tracks me?

  A muscular eyebrow perked up as the guard asked with a tinge of condescension, “Is there a problem with that?”

  “Of course not, just curious.”

  Sindhu rolled up her sleeve and moments later flinched as the officer’s LFActuator hissed its payload into her shoulder. She opened her eyes and looked at the mark the gun had left: a small square, no more than one millimeter wide, was clearly visible protruding under her skin, yet she felt nothing—her shoulder had been numbed in the process. Sindhu’s fingers caressed the bump analytically.

  “It might hurt a bit tomorrow, but the pain should subside quickly. These are not stemgineered; they’re old school, so there’s a slight chance of infection. If it still hurts two days from now, drop by the infirmary. That said, the device itself will likely report a problem before you do.”

  “Got it,” Sindhu replied, and waited for further instructions.

  The guard shrugged, then added, “That’s it, you’re done. Report to your manager in facilities, they’ll give you the tour.”

  Surprised, Sindhu scuttled out of a small door in the back of the office and stepped immediately into a hallway so cavernous that she nearly tripped in astonishment. Slowing her gait, she looked around in awe. The arched ceiling of the hall seemed to glisten—an effect that made the observer feel as though rain was pouring down outside. The floors were similarly hypnotic; long and sleek, they appeared seamless. Sindhu looked down and saw small waves rippling out from under her feet. She took a step, then another, and smiled, realizing that she appeared to be walking on water. The optical illusion was furthered by the illusion of the water having depth—an occasional fish surfaced and nibbled on her shoes as she walked.

  “Keep moving, Tamalika. Please head south; you are expected in facilities immediately.” The voice—unpleasant to the ears—emanated from a nearby floating holoAttendant and referred to Sindhu by the fake name she and Simeon had created. She had chosen Tamalika—her mother’s name.

  Sindhu hurried her pace but did not stop her gawking.

  The next hour mirrored the next week: a constant ushering from place to place, on the strictest of schedules, never wavering. Sindhu was officially employed as a facilities technician. Though many remedial tasks were taken care of through automatic means (small oblong robots of brushed metal silently skirted across the glossy floors of the facility at all hours, constantly collecting crumbs of waste as they simultaneously buffed the marble floors they drove upon), there was still much for the staff to accomplish. “Who cleans the cleaners?” her manager was fond of asking rhetorically. They were trained in groups, each group responsible for a small fraction of a wing of Titus. Sindhu was stationed on the southeast row of the diamond-shaped building, within one of the Silas Wright Titus wings.

  In her small amount of free time, Sindhu would comb the facility with staggering efficiency; she could traverse the entirety of the monstrous building by foot in a full day, but this did not reward her with much more than exhausting exercise. She’d heard rumors of underground high-speed transit to the other wings, but the system was either not online yet, or restricted to more important employees. Sindhu guessed the latter.

  At nights, Sindhu would take copious notes in her head. She would analyze every scant detail of the facility, from corpNet wireless handoff points to the locations of all toilets. And yet to Sindhu, none of this information amounted to anything. Titus seemed more sterile and innocuous than a free hospital. She was beginning to wonder if all their suspicions were misplaced.

  Until, that is, her manager presented her team with the option to attend augmented education classes.

  “Classes? For what—job training?” asked a young man in the back as he stifled an early-morning yawn.

  “Yes, but anything you want, really. They have courses on everything; from botany to biology. It’s a perk of Titus: You have the option of continuing your education. I’ve been attending for several months. You aren’t offered them until you’ve excelled for a month on the job.”

  The team of twenty Titus facilities techs sat in their preday ready room, a small room with desks facing a holoWall. The morning routine, no different on this morning, consisted of their manager confirming daily tasks as outlined by their autonomous representative. Several team members munched on belated breakfasts as the manager spoke.

  “Augmented education?” Sindhu asked indifferently during a pause in the conversation. “Augmented by what?”

  “Some kind of new tech—seems pretty harmless.”

  Thankfully, someone else to Sindhu’s right asked the obvious follow-up question: “Tech? Is it . . . implanted?”

  “No, no, just a hat you wear as you learn. Very simple—noninvasive.”

  The manager seemed exasperated. He was a tall man who always slouched, as if he was ashamed of his height. Frustrated, he now stood a little taller and crinkled his eyes, then interrupted a few of his chatty team members by saying, “Look, guys, this is optional. It’s not a big deal, it’s not required. Enough on that—let’s go over our tasks for the day.”

  The daily task review was Sindhu’s least favorite part of the day—a complete waste of time. Today, however, she was invigorated. It was time to get to work.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  When the holoDoor chimed shut, Korak waved a hand in the air and
a one-meter-tall, three-dimensional version of Reverend Coglin appeared sitting on Korak Searle’s desk. Coglin’s thick gray hair appeared as if it needed to be cut, just as it had for the better part of a century. The beard on his rotund face looked the same as it had since he and Korak had first met so many years ago. He’d guessed correctly that Coglin had grown the beard to lend himself a sense of gravitas at a time when Coglin was seeking to distance himself from his youthful on-air personality. On this day, he wore a nondescript, blue, button-down shirt without a tie. Black slacks complemented the large blazer that hung somewhere off holoCam.

  “Korak, what have you got for me?” Coglin appeared in a good mood; his smile cut through a myriad of wrinkles. Even after all these decades, his smile was still infectious, though he used it far less often than he used to.

  “Reverend, I thought you might be interested to know that Mr. Dansby will be traveling to the Titus facility tomorrow.”

  “Excellent. And has there been a final decision made on his role? Have we gleaned any further information per his relationship with SOP? Is he trying to communicate with them? Has he given them any information?”

  “Not that we know of, Reverend. He’s been clean. It seems like he’s working hard and being a productive member of the team. But we’ll be . . .” Searle paused, searching for the correct word “. . . evaluating his effectiveness—actively—over the next seventy-two hours. This will determine the course of action we take on what role we ultimately assign to him.”

  His role was decided the moment his uncle’s brain became irrevocably scrambled, thought Coglin, but his reply was less revealing. “Fantastic. I trust you won’t make any final decisions without consulting me. At this point, I view our friend Dylan as the single greatest opportunity and the single greatest risk to our goals.”

  Tell him what you think. You need to begin to undermine his confidence, spoke the devil on Korak’s shoulder.