by Jim Nelson
“I thought about pulling the plug,” he said from the closet door jamb. “I couldn’t find the power cord, though. I even tried turning off the circuit breaker for the whole office.”
“It has its own power source,” I said over my shoulder.
“A battery?”
“An atomic battery,” I said. “This safe’s computer will outlive civilization. Not that anyone would be around to open it.”
“You can, right?”
With my tablet’s near-field receiver, I scanned the safe and the walls around its perimeter. “Looks clean,” I said. “No Nexternet signal going in or out of the safe.”
“Is that good?”
It meant no memory-retention server was stored inside. "Good for you," I said. "Otherwise, I wouldn't touch this job with a ten-foot pole."
I began extracting equipment from my satchel. “You told me the safe was asleep for a month,” I said. “This says it was asleep for less than a day.”
I tapped the touchscreen again and double-checked its display. The safe’s interface revealed plenty. It may sound backwards, a so-called secure safe revealing so much, but its security lay in its design, not in hiding information from the outside world.
“I’m guessing the safe is configured to an initial back-off time of one hour," I said. "You told me the back-off was a full day.”
Lotte shrugged. “Does that make a difference?”
“You made it sound a lot more ominous in my office yesterday,” I said. “What the safe’s telling me is it’s a lot less secure than you let on.”
“That’s good, right?”
“I’m not saying it’s going to be easy,” I said. “But now this looks more like an engram-lock for a psychiatrist, not a military contractor.”
Over the next twenty minutes, I assembled my equipment: an engram predictor, a multicore extender to boost the predictor’s horsepower, a transformer for my memex, a port splitter, and a neuro-mimetic micro-brick. I configured the engram predictor with the safe’s model and all the information I could find through the touchscreen. While he was way off when it came to the safe’s configuration, his hunch about the sonnets seemed on the money. That was exactly the kind of engram a safe manufacturer would have recommended to medical professionals.
“Come in here,” I told Lotte. “Bring something to sit on.”
He rolled in a desk chair. “Do we need two?”
“Take a seat.” There was only room for one chair. I sat on the floor. “And bring that book in here too.”
Lotte sat beside my equipment sprawled out on the floor. The bare overhead bulb provided ample illumination to work. Once the engram predictor was initialized, I instructed Lotte to remove his memex. His hand halted over the back of his neck.
“I want to remain muted,” he said.
Breathing out, shaking my head, I said, “I don’t have time for this.”
“Will you honor my mute while my memex is removed?”
"Scout's honor," I said.
He pried up his memex. He handed it to me with some trepidation.
Handing a stranger something as personal as one’s memex is like giving a stranger your diary. It’s worse, since you can lie to your diary. A memex faithfully records every personal unguarded thought you form. A memex is a liver for your brain, an oil filter all your mental garbage is pumped through. Only the purest, cleanest thoughts make it out to the Nexternet for the world to consume. The raw, ugly thoughts remain stashed in your memex until it runs out of memory. Then it discards them to make way for more nasty, brutal thoughts. Our minds produce these little sins like our kidneys produce piss.
I attached his memex to the splitter’s Slot A. I pried my memex loose and thumbed it into Slot B. When I jacked the splitter into the engram predictor, the predictor lit up and began auto-configuring itself for our memexes. Four minutes later, it reported ready.
I had Lotte re-insert his memex and I did the same. Now our brains were soft-linked wirelessly to the engram predictor. The final step was to connect the predictor to the safe itself.
“The safe can’t tell the difference between your memex and the engram predictor,” I explained to Lotte. “Because it’s been configured with your neuron patterns, the predictor ‘looks’ like you to the safe’s software. The safe thinks the predictor is a human being.”
“Ok,” Lotte said, a touch befuddled but playing along. “Why are you connected to it?”
“To guide you along. The engram predictor will tell me what it’s detecting as it communicates with the safe. Think of it this way. I’m here to coach you through this.”
Standing on my knees and shuffling between all the equipment gave me a good sweat. The closet was growing ripe. My lower back ached. Perspiration ran down my cheeks and nose. I was fifty-five. This was a young man’s job.
I depressed the engram predictor’s blue ACTIVATE button. The optical cable I’d run between the predictor and the safe glowed. A neural link was bonded between the two.
“Pick one of the lines from the book,” I told Lotte. “Say it aloud.” Open sesame.
“Which one?”
“Doesn’t matter,” I told him.
“But if it’s wrong, won’t the safe go to sleep again?”
“The engram predictor won’t pass it along to the safe until it’s certain it’s the correct line,” I said. “That’s what the box can do. It can predict what words the safe is waiting for.”
Lotte shrugged and gave me a whatever you say look. He opened the massive tome in his lap and turned to a marked page. “Any line?” he asked me.
I thumbed a tear of sweat from my eye. “Just say a line, dammit.”
In a careful, measured voice—an actor’s voice—he read aloud: “Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments.”
The engram predictor fed back a burst of data via my memex. I cycled the data to my pocket tablet for an external visual representation. Sometimes it’s easier to visually process the cubes and spheres of data than to manipulate them in your mind’s eye. The young people, they don’t want any physical representation at all. They live and walk among abstractions. I need lines and colors and shapes and forms. And buttons. I need buttons, even if they’re drawn on a touchscreen and not physical at all.
Lotte waited patiently with the book in his lap. He watched me work as I thumbed through the data on the tablet’s screen.
“The first line doesn’t concern ‘marriage’ or ‘impediments,’” I told Lotte, as though it was useful information to him. “But the word ‘admits’ triggered a response. Let’s try the next one.”
Lotte turned to the next marked sonnet. In the same measured tone, he read aloud: “Yet, do thy worst old Time: despite thy wrong, My love shall in my verse ever live young.”
Another burst of data erupted from the engram detector. It spilled across my tablet’s touchscreen and filled my head with a kind of ordered static.
“’Time’ is an engrammatic match,” I told Lotte without looking up from my tablet. “’Wrong’ matches too. Ok, so the first line regards an admission. It regards being wronged over a span of time—”
A flood of static swamped my brain. My body felt soaked with electrical discharge. It skittered over me like a hive of millipedes running up my skin. I fell on my back, jaw chattering. A spasm shot down my right arm. Two more spasms followed, as quick as Morse code. My legs kicked, and in the far distance, I heard a clattering of metal. My vision flooded pure white. Grasping at nothingness, I fell headlong into a bright pool of void.
*
The door before me was average in every respect. It was painted with the inoffensive off-white color landlords use to quickly rent a piece of property. No lock or deadbolt could be seen. No keyhole was set in the faux brass knob. The plain flat frame around the door was painted the same color as the door. The wall was painted the same color as the door and the frame, and the ceiling was the same color as well. Without knowing why, with no sense of purpose at all, I reac
hed for the doorknob, twisted, and pushed through.
I entered a room with walls and ceiling painted the same inoffensive color as the door behind me. The room was not particularly large but not claustrophobic either. I estimated it to be a perfect cube, sixteen feet along all edges. The floor was covered with wall-to-wall burgundy carpeting. It was the same color as the envelope.
Doors identical to the one I just walked through were set in all three walls before me. No numbering or markings could be seen. I mentally named them A, B, and C. Behind me, the door I just passed through closed with a soft but resolute click. I named it D. On the ceiling was another door, plain white with a simple knob. I named it E. Another door lay on the floor set in the burgundy carpet. I named it F. Otherwise, the room was empty.
Without thought, I selected door B. I twisted the knob and passed through in one step.
The door closed behind me with a soft but resolute click. I stood in an sixteen-by-sixteen room with burgundy carpeting and three off-white doors on each wall. A, B, C, and the door I just went though, D. Above me was a fifth door, E. Below me a sixth door, F.
Gradually, a panic rose in my throat. I rushed from A to B to C to D, opening each. Sixteen-by-sixteen rooms waited beyond each door. Each room had the same burgundy carpet and off-white doors centered on their walls and ceilings and floors. I jumped to reach E, but its knob was well beyond my reach. I crouched and pulled up F. Below me was another room of white doors and burgundy carpeting.
I spun in a circle. I’d lost my bearings. Which door did I come through to reach this room? All I knew was that I'd not entered through the ceiling or the floor. A moment later, I even wondered if that was true.
I set my hat on the carpet beside one of the doors. I picked the door at random. My decisions had no rhyme or reason now. I flung open the door and walked through it. The door closed behind me with a click.
My hat rested on the floor opposite. I tried it on. It fit perfectly. It was soft from years of use. It was still warm from my residual body heat. It was still damp from the rain outside.
Outside. Nothing was outside this place. Outside this room was this room.
I was trapped in a mental construct. Someone had installed a snare in the safe’s software. My memex routed this crazy nightmare straight into my cerebral cortex. Reality and virtual reality were interlocked and indistinct. They blended like a river’s fresh water pouring into a foul, polluted ocean. I was trapped in a rabbithole.
16.
The first rabbitholes emerged from Russia in 2029. No one knows who invented them, although that’s not a mystery puzzled over much anymore. Like the Molotov Cocktail, the recipe for rabbitholes doesn’t require much imagination, just ambition and single-minded purpose.
In 2029, memexes began flying off the shelves. Surgeons were backlogged performing cranio-spinal taps day and night. Some clinics performed twenty outpatient taps per day, surgeons and anesthesiologists hot-swapping surgery rooms three shifts round the clock.
Early hypernovels emerged soon, virtual scenarios enveloping your consciousness in a pure constructed totality. For an hour, you were a soldier in World War II, or a race car driver in Indianapolis, or a space pilot navigating a ship through the gas giants of the Antares Nebula. The pornographic possibilities were obvious, of course. Properly programmed, a memex can create a dream-state more realistic and engrossing than any biological dream.
Rabbitholes were the next logical step. They appeared on the Nexternet like vermin in the alley behind a restaurant. The early designs were simple, almost childish. Mazes with no exit. Unending Tic-Tac-Toe matches. Rock-Paper-Scissors where with every throw both sides pick the same. Rabbitholes started as games you could never finish. They’re hobbled software. For a legitimate game designer, it’s a flaw. For the hackers who produce rabbitholes, an unwinnable game is the objective. Computer malware used to take control of a computer. Now it takes control of a brain.
I wasted untold hours of memex-time rushing between identical rooms of identical doors. I left behind hats and shoes and socks in a vain attempt to discover some path out of the maze. Every door out led back to rooms of my hat, shoes, and socks. A maze with one path and no exit, an ouroboros, the snake eating its own tail. The mirage of reality was so thorough—my mind so captive to the software’s illusions—I could not see the obvious: All doors led to one room. It was the simplest maze devised. I was conscious I was trapped in a rabbithole, but the totality of my situation remained beyond my grasp. So obsessed with the game, I began studying every detail before me, the pile of the carpet, the paintbrush lines in the coat of paint on the doors.
The doors appeared identical. Even for a rabbithole, they appeared too identical. With the edge of my money clip, I scratched a line down one frame. The same line appeared on the other five, even the ones in the ceiling and floor. The doors appeared to be six duplicates of the same model. Copying inanimate objects is the mark of a lazy memex programmer. A sophisticated modeler would have introduced subtle variations to reinforce the illusion.
I pulled open the nearest door. Another room lay beyond. Without stepping through, I released the door. It quietly swung closed and latched with a soft click. I opened it again and tossed my hat through the doorway. Something struck me on back of my knee and I swung around. My hat lay upside-down at my feet, teetering back and forth on its shaped crown. Behind me, the door latched with a soft click.
To break a rabbithole, you must cause a fault in the code. There is no timer. It does not run out of batteries. You must force an exception.
I opened the door again. I’d removed my shoes in earlier attempts to exit the maze. I used one to prop the door ajar. The doors were not heavy. I propped open a second door with my other shoe. Surprisingly, I could wedge open the third with my hat. I stripped off my suit jacket, balled it up, and used its mass to prop open the fourth door. I did the same with my trousers to wedge the door in the floor open.
I was stymied how to prop open the door in the ceiling. I couldn’t even reach it, and if I could, I was out of material to keep it open. Hands on my hips, probably looking ridiculous in my underwear, I stared up at the ceiling pondering what to do next.
My trousers hung from the ceiling. The door was already open. My belt swung like a noose from above. My trousers on the floor were the trousers on the ceiling.
In every direction I could see more empty rooms. I expected more closed doors in those rooms. With all doors open, the other rooms lacked their own doors now. Their walls were blank white, no doors, no exits to speak of.
With all doors open, the rabbithole could not generate a room of closed doors to block my way. After all, there was only one room and six instances of the same door. They were the entirety of this maze. I stepped through one of the doors propped open and entered a room without doors. With that, I forced a general fault in the software.
My vision went white once more. For the first time in what seemed like hours, I found myself in a new place.
*
I stood before another door. It was not the plain off-white door of the maze. This door was at the top of a narrow flight of cement stairs ascending from a sidewalk below. Numbers were painted on the door's window, the street address of this duplex in Bernal Heights. It was Wednesday, October 11 of 2010, a Wednesday: a silver Wednesday.
I’d saved taxi fare by taking the bus to Cortland Avenue. I’d walked up the steep hill from the stop on Mission Street. I was there to audition for a film. It was a ludicrous idea. I was not an actor. I had no training or experience. Like a nerd, I’d prepared myself by reading the Method Acting entry on Wikipedia. That was all I knew.
On the other hand, I could not see any downside to auditioning. Most likely the woman I met at the Palace Hotel bar would recognize she’d made a drastic mistake asking me to audition. A few minutes before the camera, she would smile politely and thank me for my time, We’ll be in touch, that sort of thing. Even if for some fathomless reason I passed the audition, I cou
ld always say “no thanks” and put the whole affair behind me. Life on rare occasion offers you a chance to experience something you’d otherwise never get to experience. I was brimming with a sense of naive adventure.
I was winded from the walk up Cortland Avenue. My armpits and neckline were sticky. A bolt of sweat rappelled down the side of my large face. Cline greeted me at the front door with an off-putting indifference. “Come on up,” she ordered me.
I followed Cline up another narrow flight of stairs to the top floor of the duplex. I would describe it as an apartment of college students: untended, loose, bordering on chaotic. Italian and Japanese cinema film posters from the 1950s and 1960s hung throughout the apartment.
“We’re running late,” Cline told me. “My cameraman is still setting up.”
She led me to a living room of rattan furniture and bean bags and Rastafarian bric-a-brac. A broad bay window looked down upon the street below and allowed in plenty of sunlight. Tables and rattan furniture had been pushed to the far side of the room as though someone had picked up the floor at one edge and let them slide down. Cameras and video equipment filled the space made free by the rearrangement.
“Mind where you step,” Cline told me. She wore a man’s creased button-up shirt and black toreadors. She was bare-footed. She nodded toward a young tanned man standing among the film equipment. “This is Rod,” she said. “He’s my cameraman.”
Rod wore a tie-dyed shirt and ratty blue jeans. His feet were also bare. He leaned over a tripod adjusting a digital video camera. Around him stood a forest of tripods and stands with professional lighting and microphones and more mounted cameras of assorted shapes and manufacturers. I assumed they were for different purposes, close-ups and wide-angles and the like.