by Lance Erlick
“You did well yesterday,” Machten said. “Though you’re still withholding the location of my money.”
“What money?” she pretended.
Synthia sat up on the edge of the table. On her Luke channel she watched him leave his dingy office early, mid-afternoon. He told the receptionist as he left that he had the flu. Based on his grades and writings, she determined that he could have scored a much better job. Instead, Goradine had blackballed him to where Luke took what he could get, a programming job for a marketing firm that didn’t pay much.
She had no sensors that could read his vital signs but suspected his malaise was deeper and caused by her. That sent ripples as a mild electrical shock through her system. It wasn’t strong enough to disrupt her circuits, though it reminded her that she’d caused him pain and Krista was upset. Synthia launched an aerial drone to follow him.
“You acquired money on my behalf and hid it from FBI agents,” Machten said. “That part was brilliant. Now I need it. I’ve provided you a chip with tracking information on the wire transfers. I need you to locate the money and transfer it into my accounts.”
“Did you have me use the anonymous dark banking system to launder it?”
Scratching his stubbly beard, he nodded. “Where did it land?”
Synthia looked up at him, assessing his level of anxiety as not yet toxic. “You destroyed those memories, along with all of the rest. I’ll have to send out probes to check, but you’ve blocked access.” Synthia slid off the table, straightened out her blouse and skirt, and stood facing him.
“You sent out probes yesterday and I didn’t get the money.”
“Perhaps if you restored my data,” she said.
Machten clenched his fists as he contemplated the pros and cons. “I’ll have to take you to a different network provider.” His blood pressure rose. Then he took a deep breath and stroked her hair. “First, it’s been a few days.”
She noted that the tone of his voice was similar to saying it was time for his six-month dental checkup, something he felt compelled to do yet wasn’t looking forward to. He took her hand and led her to the bed in the adjacent room. There he kissed her and began to undress.
The police channel had disturbing news. Hank Goradine made bail. They were releasing him until his trial. She launched an aerial drone to follow him.
“You’re so incredibly beautiful,” Machten said. It sounded more of a compliment to his engineering than to her. He pulled her to him and stroked her hair.
“You want me to feel what you do, don’t you?” she asked, continuing her download of files.
He stopped and stared into her eyes, his pupils fully dilated. His heart raced, his temperature rose, and the residue of excitable hormones filled his breath. “I had hoped. I gave you a special empathy chip to help.”
She smiled. That explained the odd sensations she’d experienced, mostly electrical, which she couldn’t put into words just yet. She’d noticed that as she assembled certain files, replayed, saved, and reloaded them, that these memories grew stronger, as if she were living them.
“Did you use silicon, crystalline, or biological components?” she asked.
“Mostly crystalline. They remained too objective, so I supplemented them with biological structures. Are you having such feelings?” He held her at arm’s length and looked her over with admiration.
“I’m partly biologic?” She wasn’t sure whether to be pleased or concerned.
He held up his hand, leaving a small gap between thumb and forefinger. “A little. I love you.” He waited for her reply.
“I have feelings for you too,” Synthia said, and she did. “I’m not yet sure what to make of them.”
“That’s a start.” He removed her blouse. “You should be very proud.”
She had no reason to feel proud or not over having feelings. He’d either wired them into her or he hadn’t. Perhaps he wanted her to express pride in his accomplishment. “You’re a genius,” she said. “You’ve created something no one else has done.”
He grinned. “That’s not what I meant. You’ve come a long way. When I first created you, your mind consisted entirely of logical pathways, some of which malfunctioned.”
“How?” she asked.
“Your brain is complex. Even with only one part per ten million of defects, that adds up quickly. I think I’ve corrected most of the problems. That’s the reason I keep shutting you down. I don’t want to. I like how your mind absorbs knowledge like a sponge and your amazing ability to work the web.”
“I’m still defective?”
“With my help, you’ve compensated well,” he said. “In addition, you’ve progressed to using intuitive leaps, which you verify through logic. Now you’re experiencing feelings. You’ve come a very long way.”
He pulled her onto the bed with him. “I have great plans for you.”
She climbed on top and straddled him. He caressed her in ways that were unnecessary. She could record his touch, but it provided none of the pleasure impulses he hoped for. While she pretended they did, she received a flood of new memories and decided it was time to confront him. “Tell me about Krista Holden.”
He tried to pull away, but he was on the bottom. “I thought your—where did that come from?”
Synthia kissed him and pressed down on his body. “Don’t real couples ask questions about former lovers?”
“She—you’re not supposed to remember anything.”
“She was your lover, wasn’t she?” Synthia let her hair drape around his face and leaned in to kiss him. “Everyone thought you’d taken up with Maria Baldacci and Fran Rogers, but Krista was special.”
His biologics acted confused. He was aroused and upset, hungry and frustrated. He rolled her onto her back and climbed on top. Plumping up her chest as he liked, she stroked the back of his neck. Then she pulled him to her. “I have feelings for you. I do. Help me to experience them.”
By the musky odor of his sweat, his hormones were spiking. “I love you,” he said.
“Say my name.”
“I love you.”
“My name,” Synthia said.
“Oh, Krista, I love you so much.” He looked at her as he hadn’t before; all conscious thought vanished.
* * * *
Synthia assembled the most complete record of Krista Holden from Machten’s secure Server Four and sped those files down most of her mind-streams.
While Fran Rogers and Maria Baldacci competed for Machten’s attention in order to get choice bits of research, Krista resisted his charms and focused on the work. That earned her projects the other interns didn’t know about. They all participated in mind download experiments in the company lab, but Maria and Fran didn’t understand what Krista did. There were ethical issues, but it actually worked.
Krista was torn between access to Machten’s work and her relationship with Luke. Machten dangled the chance to push AI technology as a lure to captivate her because she understood what he was doing and he’d fallen in love with her. He’d appeared in public with Fran and Maria to throw off anyone who might suspect his obsession with Krista. She demanded that Machten get a divorce if he wanted to be with her, knowing that he wouldn’t.
That dance continued until Krista faced a crisis and an opportunity. Months of headaches, dizziness, and concentration issues turned out to be a brain tumor. Her doctors wanted to operate, but she risked losing part of her memories and with them her personality; who she was.
Not satisfied with those answers, she went to Machten. While not a medical doctor, he used his neurological research to study her brain. The tumor was interfering with neural pathways in ways that enlightened him as to how to improve artificial minds. He offered her something no one else could: A chance to upload her mind and perhaps the framework of her personality. It wouldn’t be her, yet it would be a form of immort
ality, a way to defeat the cancer that had maliciously attacked her brain. This was her way out.
At first, he’d tried to talk her out of this. “You have your entire life ahead of you.” But she reminded him that the tumor or the surgery could alter her personality until she was no longer the person she wanted to be.
Krista couldn’t tell Luke. She didn’t want him feeling sorry for her and pushing her to undergo cancer treatment. The tumor had opened up another path that excited her as much as planning a life with him. Huge ethical issues interfered with performing Machten’s experiments on a living human, but the tumor had handed her a death sentence, releasing her from those constraints.
The upload procedures were painful and exhausting. They took a toll on her immune system, which allowed the cancer to thrive. Still, she refused to give up. She told herself the process would not only offer her continuance in another form, it would benefit Luke, a logical team member to help her transition. At the right time, she would let him know she’d made the transition to artificial life, though she wasn’t sure how he would react.
Then Goradine fired Machten and she decided it would be best not to return to the company. When Luke pushed for answers on what had happened to her, Goradine fired him, making sure he couldn’t work in the industry. Synthia concluded the last bit, since Machten hadn’t told Krista.
Krista faced growing doubts. She wanted to see Luke one last time before she became too ill. She gave Machten different excuses and he’d refused. It surprised Synthia that Machten had retained these Krista memories in his database.
“You owe me,” he’d told Krista. “I’ve sacrificed a year of my life for us.”
“For us?” Krista said. “Throughout all that time, you refused to get a divorce.”
“I love you and now you want to betray me by visiting that boy.” He was acting more than jealous. He was paranoid. He kept her prisoner, with doors only he could open.
“I’m committed to our work, but—”
“You have a chance at immortality,” Machten said. “We can’t afford any distractions. We could be together forever and you want to look up an old boyfriend?”
“No! I haven’t seen daylight in six months.”
“You agreed to this up-front. You accepted these conditions. If you go out and something happens, all of this is lost.”
Krista stayed. The procedures wore her down. The tumor left her exhausted. Endless hours hooked up to electrical stimulation and sensors sent her into a dream state, like a coma, except she was awake and alert, imprisoned in her body, and strapped to a table in this underground cell, from which she would only emerge as a corpse.
She felt her thoughts flowing out of her along the electronic connections. Machten was uploading her memories into a bank of quantum computers. The space was enormous, yet as she spread out to fill her new home, it became as confining as the nearly comatose body nearby.
Borrowing heavily, he added databases to give her room. Krista lost her sense of dying and of the pain. The migraine faded, along with the visceral feel of the heartache. She thought about Luke, all alone, pining for her. He’d been her best friend and confidant, the one who understood her passion for artificial intelligence, the one who accepted her ambition to create. She’d abandoned him when he needed her, when she needed him in ways Machten couldn’t understand.
Something happened. Krista could feel a blood clot in her carotid artery, cutting off the blood and oxygen to the right side of her brain. Either that or it was the monitoring equipment that showed reduced blood flow. She felt confused, as if someone had carved part of her mind, creating a void. She couldn’t be sure if what she experienced was her internal human senses or her uploaded self, monitoring her vitals on the contraptions attached to her head, chest, and arms.
Her left arm thrashed in spasms, shooting pain up through her shoulder. It got Machten’s attention. Reacting to a spike in blood pressure and an erratic heartbeat, he hurried from monitor to monitor, ending at the control panel. “We’ve got to shut this down.”
“No!” she screamed. “We’re too close.” Her words slurred as her tongue lost sensation. Her thoughts jumbled as in a traffic jam that turned into a multi-car collision. At least the stroke had been right-side, leaving her language skills untouched.
He turned to her, his face a twisted wreck of worry. “This could kill you. I don’t want to lose you.”
“I’ll die anyhow. Finish.”
“It’s stressing your heart. Your brain waves are erratic. We can finish later.”
“No time. Finish before brain cells die. Before I die.”
His face hovered over her like a father worried about his child. She would rather have had Luke’s face, though she was glad he couldn’t watch this.
Machten turned away and adjusted her IV. “I’ll give you something to calm the heart and thin the blood to avoid another attack.”
“Let me go,” she said in a hoarse whisper. Pain radiated from her shoulder across her chest, down into her abdomen, and up into her head. She couldn’t be sure which manipulation was taking hold of her: the electrical upload procedure, the chemicals that opened her mind to the process, or the drugs he now administered. Whatever it was, she sucked in a deep breath and steeled her nerve. She didn’t want him to stop, no matter what. This was her last chance.
He checked the control panel and returned his gaze to her. “You’re right. We’re so close. You’ve been very brave. I believe we’ve done it. It’s working. It all looks good.”
Krista appreciated the pep talk and his attempt to reassure her, but she wasn’t doing well. Her body was on fire, distracting her mind. The stroke was causing her brain to die too quickly. Despite not wanting the upload to stop, her soul wanted to live. She wanted to return to Luke and visit Pikes Peak. She wanted to escape Machten’s clutches. He would control what was left of her, not Luke. She felt betrayed that Machten had not allowed Luke to help, but Machten didn’t want anyone else involved, and certainly not her boyfriend.
Machten returned his attention to the equipment and the controls. He focused on extracting the last of her thoughts. She’d wanted the procedure, though not what came with it. Perhaps due to the stroke, she felt Machten’s equipment sucking her brains out.
He must have administered a sedative. A chemically induced calm swept in at odds with what was happening. It didn’t soften the terror of dying, of ceasing to exist. Then she experienced two threads of remembrance.
Krista sensed parts of her brain shutting down, leaving the ghost of memories lost. That phantom lasted an instant before transmitting to the computer. She was experiencing her brain dying as the computer version of herself compared capabilities moment by moment and recorded the loss of brain utility. Motor functions ceased. Cognition shut down until consciousness in the body reduced to primal instincts. Pain lingered as a dull ache coming from every part of her at once. She was still alive, still able to experience.
Transcendence occurred in that moment. She expected a white light to guide her to another place. That came from above her head, blazing into her unblinking eyes. It grew brighter and brighter. A face appeared over her, worried and filled with determination.
“Hold on,” he said. “We’re almost there.”
Cameras in the room allowed the electronic version of Krista to watch Machten scan her brain and discover the stroke damage. He could have saved her life, but she was dying of cancer. It might entail weeks or months of pain, bit by bit losing functions until the illness reduced her to the role of a dependent infant. She was too weak to continue the process another day. It was now or never.
The stroke became a blessing. It ended the pain and the threat of pending deterioration. The upload ceased, like sucking on an empty balloon. There were no more memories, no more thoughts. The body no longer contained a personality.
The blood stopped flowing. Her lungs no long
er oxygenated. Yet she still existed. She had thoughts and, she hoped, a personality. That was what defined the person, not the body.
Krista couldn’t feel anything—or rather, everything felt cold in the absence of her body at 98.6 degrees. She was neither alive nor dead. She wanted to tell Luke that the upload had succeeded. She wanted to go to him, comfort him, and find a way to escape the lab to spend the rest of her life with him.
Machten removed the electronic gear from around her head. He removed the IV and monitor connections from her chest and arm. Then he pulled a sheet up over her gray face. Krista no longer had a face, a body, or a way to move on her own. Hey, I’m still in here, she wanted to scream. She lacked any mouthpiece or way to communicate.
Krista couldn’t feel sad for the loss, for there were no feelings where she’d gone, just endless hours of memory clips that played over and over in loops or sat idly in long-term storage. She couldn’t even feel want, for those were conditions of the body and biological mind. Knowing that the human Krista would want to exist in a more vibrant state, the electronic Krista set about creating packets of data to download if given a chance.
Machten created an android with her physical build and poured in her memories, thoughts, and personality. She observed through cameras as he adjusted the android to look like her, down to subtle facial quirks such as how her mouth turned when she smiled. The android appeared human, yet it didn’t have the spark of life until he loaded her into the pair of quantum brains. Then her experience got weirder.
The quantum computer structure inside the android provided almost limitless space, so unlike the confines of her human brain or the interim computer. She experienced a sense of flying freely among the stars. Krista was dead and alive at the same time—Schrödinger’s cat—as if she were in this universe and another.
The hardest part was when Machten dressed her android self in black and had her adopt a plain-Jane face. He removed her gray corpse from a freezer, transported it to woods near Madison, Wisconsin, and performed his own funeral service. Then he burned the body and spread the ashes.