Cypulchre

by Joseph Travers MacKinnon

  The COM rings again. Suddenly, all of the monitors cut to a warning error: “Emergency in neural-research lab.”

  A siren cuts the clinical quiet. One-hundred red lights start flashing, accenting the blaring cacophony.

  Transfixed on the blinking cursor on the holographic query box, linked to a now-conversational, self-aware ape, Paul clenches his teeth. “What now?”

  “Dr. Sheffield,” Oni shouts down from the Observation Deck, “Dr. Katajima is trying to page you.”

  “So bloody impatient!” Paul hesitates over the query box. “Dammit!” He drives away from Kim on his chair, gets up, parachutes his lab jacket, and steps into the falling white fabric. He returns to the query box, his jacket flaring behind him. “What does he want?”

  “He’s having difficulties with an unscheduled test.”

  Paul lunges to the elevated terminal copying and storing lab-commands and functions, and requests a back-up. “Tell him I’m a little preoccupied right now. The fruit of six-years-worth of research. He’s jealous, that’s what this is,” Paul points at Kim. “And he wants to rain on my parade.”

  “He says it is urgent.”

  “If it’s so damn important, tell him to wake up Tesla. Hell, Winchester’s still around, isn’t he?”

  Oni sighs, clearly not appreciating being the intermediary between two megalomaniacs. She huffs into the receiver, and nods. “Dr. Sheffield, he says he cannot have it on record.”

  Paul returns to Kim, and lays hands on his chest and forehead. He recoils to type a message to his very first Humanities student.

  —KIM IS VERY BRAVE. ONI IS COMING TO TALK TO KIM.

  “Oni, watch Kim. This is it. We’re on the verge of a monumental medical and social breakthrough!” The doctor transfers lab-command to Oni via his tablet. “Vitals go down, localize him. Use the PILOT device. It’ll take over Kim’s basic motor functions and substitute-in for his medulla oblongata, so we won’t need a ventilator.”

  Oni returns a knowing smile, bounds to the back of the Observation Deck, and shimmies down the ladder.

  “Dr. Sheffield,” she says between rungs, “Will you need any assistance in the neural lab?”

  “No, thank you. Especially not if it’s an unscheduled test. Who knows what he’s up to? Just chat Kim up. See what he’s learned. Figure out if he’s integrated anything else—check the interface against his virtual camera.” Paul runs his fingers through his hair, frantically racking his brain. “And keep him warm…Record absolutely everything. Thank you!”

  Paul opens the door to leave, and regretfully turns to see Oni resetting the interface with the crumpled human counterfeit on the slab.

  Chapter 2: DREAMSCAPE

  PAUL SHEFFIELD’s pedestrian volley crashes through the shiny, linoleum hall. As he needles toward the department’s so-called inner sanctum, he’s fanned through by swinging doors. The last set crack open to a large, moon-lit atrium. Katajima stands frazzled and bowed at the top of a mirror-arched staircase that cradles the e-meal printers on the ground floor, rowed and columned by the skylight.

  Dr. Shouta Katajima’s white hair is cropped back into a ponytail, smoothening his shiny temples. A doomed silver coif arrowheads one eyebrow, sloped into a pitiful look. Paul can read the failure written all over his colleague’s droopy posture and sweat-soused face.

  “Where have you been?” squawks Katajima, ostensibly on the verge of vomiting. “I called at least half-a-dozen times. I did not expect you to put me on track only to derail me just before arrival.”

  “You started?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well so have I. Sort of in the middle of it, actually.”

  “Paul, I would not have called you if it was not serious.” Katajima drops his gaze to compose his thoughts. “Our data was wrong.”

  “That’s impossible.”

  Katajima sighs. “Regardless, we have encountered a number of set-backs.”

  “Oh, I bet.”

  “Your projections—the ones you sent yesterday…they do not apply across the board. You…I was made to think they would.”

  “You’re out of your depth, Shouta. Get Winchester on the phone right now.”

  “We don’t need a chaperone. We just need to fix this.”

  “No. You need a goddamn saviour…Couldn’t wait for me, huh?” Paul rushes the stairs.

  “You said…”

  “I don’t recall telling you to waste both Outland’s resources and my time this late on a Friday night.”

  Katajima stabs Paul’s path with a tablet, scrolling scans from the lab. “Allen and I both agreed that it looked stable.”

  Paul brushes by Katajima, and charges into the prep-chamber. “What does Allen know, anyway? Oni’s findings demonstrated that it was too thin to walk on.”

  A red grid, stretching the area of the room, envelops both scientists, scanning for electro-magnetic signatures. The grid descends, giving off the appearance of a room leaking some red-surfaced but otherwise invisible elixir. “CLEARED FOR ENTRY” runs across the tickertape mounted on the archway, and the bolts on the heavy, iron doors retreat against powerful springs, back into their barrels.

  “Paul, you never sent me that report.”

  Katajima swipes his wrist over the SECUR-console. The door’s hydraulic arm grinds it forward into a passageway clouded by plastic curtains, draped in succession like ambitious cobwebs.

  “Don’t be preposterous. Of course I sent it.”

  “Paul, the issue—”

  Slashing through the transparencies, Paul barks back to Katajima: “Is impatience.”

  “You are being awfully inconsistent.”

  Inconsistent? He knows. He must! No. Nothing more than a blind jab from a desperate man; a hack-scientist with a crosshair on my back.

  “Listen, we thought we had enough hard drives linked.”

  “But?” says Paul, incredulous.

  “Three failed to start on-time, and the surge took out the fourth.”

  “Surge?”

  “Yeah. Anaheim reported a two-second surge across the Tri-Angeles Network, but indicated it was inside Outland parameters. I discounted it, especially with all of our graphene cells fully-loaded, but it was enough to interrupt the loop and short input-capability on all four. Only two of the drives fully recovered.”

  “And?” Sheffield stops.

  Katajima shakes his head. “Even if they all worked, it would simply not be enough.”

  “All the tests have shown that our apes max-out at around three. Four elastic Hitachi drives should have been more than enough for a momentary insertion.”

  “Check the synch,” exclaims Katajima, sheepishly, trying to keep pace with an infuriated Paul, wagging the tablet aggressively. “Please.”

  Paul, cutting-down Katajima’s demand with a glower wrenched forward, parts the lab doors. “It won’t be a problem with the synch…Which ape series did you use?” He seizes the tablet, and raps through medical updates. Stunned, Paul looks up. “Holy shit.” The tablet falls with his arm, limp against his leg.

  Katajima freezes beside him, and trades his shocked stare at Paul for the cruciform slab at the center of the lab.

  Chapter 3: SORTE

  NAKED AND MANACLED, the Shef-Ajima Project’s Chief Creative Engineer, Allen Scheele, lays splayed on a deathbed he himself designed. An oxygen mask deluges him with cold air, muting his sporadic, involuntary bellows. His purple eyelids darken under heavy-wattage lights that displace the darkness, leaving a black halo that silhouettes both Paul and Katajima.

  The engineer has become another John Henry. He lays with chest swollen and body broken after having played the machine and lost. Blood-sickles on his cheeks handle at his nose. His body is paying the price of forced transubstantiation.

  “The Board was explicit in their terms: no simian return, no human trial.”

  “Allen was under the distinct impression that you were convinced we were ready…that I was ready.”

  The Creativ
e Engineer’s head bucks back into the table, making a wet clang.

  Dr. Sheffield shakes his head in dismay. He points to the altar. “How long has he been screaming like that?”

  Katajima shrugs his shoulders, which look like hanger-ends simulating form in an oversized coat.

  Paul flicks the intercom switch. It fuzzes on. “Nurse?”

  “Yes, Doctor?”

  “I want Allen sedated.”

  “I’m afraid he already is.”

  Allen’s screams treble into disheartening yelps.

  “Then give him something stronger.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Fools! I knew it was premature. But a human? Allen?”

  “We were running behind schedule. You told me—”

  “What did I tell you?”

  Katajima’s face grows even paler. “You are not yourself, Paul.” He pulls a chair between them. “I have the message saved…”

  Paul plows forward, casting the chair aside. “Liar!” Paul’s voice rasps into an incoherent growl. “Kill Allen and defame me? I’ll have your designation for this.”

  The scorned scientist worms his way back into a bay of holographics and LED screens, and throws out his feeble arms in defensive anticipation. Paul’s upper lip curls back revealing a set of yellowed canines.

  “Paul, Paul! Stop to think! For the love of God, we need to save Allen…“

  The cautionary yellow beacon at the centre of the room turns red. Paul glances over, and unknots his fists. He returns his glare to Katajima, and hides his teeth beneath a fleshy veneer of civility.

  “Reset the receiver.”

  Off the ropes, Katajima slides a broadcast deck out of a small server tower, and claws at the tuners. The broadcast beacon twinkles above Allen’s uninhabited form, green potential patterned third in the sequence.

  Paul rolls up his sleeves, and scales the stage to check the gauge on the eight-armed mobile suspended over Allen’s head. With a finger-flick, the beacon no longer reads yellow-yellow-green, but instead offers up a solid red rectangle.

  “Allen’s hyper-stimulated.” Paul keys into the gurney-interface and prompts a diagnostic. “His off-board memory—his memex—and his brain are incompatible.”

  “How?” asks Katajima.

  Paul winces, mulling over alternatives to the unavoidable.

  “I cannot run him through the main.” An anxious edge cuts through Katajima’s tight-knit lips. “It would crash the broadcast.”

  “Catch-22.”

  “Huh?” asks Katajima, sounding more like a gasp than a question.

  “He’s finished. If we were dealing with a located mind, we’d be looking at three-hundred elastic terabytes, or a single, solid LT-pentabyte. The kind of capacity he needs now…we simply don’t have, and if we had it, we’d have needed it ten minutes ago.”

  “Say we did run him through the main,” says Katajima, grasping at straws. “Copy his current partition and direct all neural traffic to a less restrictive space...”

  “You’d be extracting one person from two places and storing him in a third. If he survived, he’d be an incoherent jumble in an immaterial prison.”

  Katajima dashes to the controller desk. Rejecting both his colleague’s analysis and his computer’s prognosis with a slap against its projection-sphere, he snaps up: “Cardiac arrest.”

  “Nurse!” bellows Paul, gesturing cartoonishly to the voyeurs biting nails in the rafters. “Get down here.”

  One of the catwalk-specters looking-on descends into the pit. She dislodges a trolley from its station, and rolls it over to an adjacent stage, similarly washed in antiquated florescence.

  “Ever assist with a back-alley electroshock?” Paul asks.

  The nurse nervously shakes her head.

  “ECT’s the only option on the table. Dr. Katajima will accept full responsibility for any and all consequences, so you needn’t worry about any liability or losing your license.”

  Overhearing this, Katajima bites his lip and continues abusing his keyboard.

  Sondra, denoted by the sloppily-penned tag on her tunic, ogles Allen. She’s already sweated through her surgical green, and the sight of Allen overloading merely expands her pit-haloes. “Can we use paddles around the machines?”

  “Let’s find out.” Paul feigns a smile so insincere that it disheartens the both of them.

  “Paul!” exclaims Katajima. “If it is not the synch-up—“

  “It’s not…”

  “Then we re-route him through his Oasis construct. It’ll be familiar territory, and far more linear and cogent a virtual space than the alternative. Besides affording him an opportunity and a place to recompose his thoughts, it will give us enough time to desynchronize him—to rain him out.”

  “The Oasis construct…”

  “It runs off a separate, dedicated drive. Large enough to store him a hundred-times over.”

  Heads bob in agreement.

  Sondra stands, a living picture of uncertainty, on the stage’s rim, halved by competing light and shadow. “Should I inform next-of-kin?”

  Katajima shakes his head, hoping Paul’s too busy to have overheard the question.

  Paul bulls through safety locks and emergency routines on his medical tablet, hoping to transmigrate Allen’s de-localized self. He thumbs the sequence ready, and spins it into an offering. Katajima reaches for the tablet.

  Paul holds on for an extra second, squeezing as much disdain and frustration he can manage through a grimace to his colleague. “Buffer the Oasis and hope to God it works.”

  Katajima yanks on the tablet.

  Paul seizes Shouta’s retracting wrist. “Remember: you fall alone.”

  KATAJIMA SKIRTS the medical terminals, alight with holographic glare. A malapropos melody tolls from one of the computers. He pivots, and coils over the dash.

  “It’s up,” he says.

  A red, green, and blue lattice forms above Allen’s bloody husk, now at home in two realities. The holographic lines and colours fuse and morph, constructing a low-res visualization of the two-pentabyte Oasis construct. It’s a photo-realistic virtual world, maligned by surrealistic architecture and fauna. Whereas the CLOUD is a space defined by the person or persons actively imagining it, the Oasis is bound to the set of laws Allen set for it. Paul imagines it’s a close approximation to an acid-trip-inspired video game, not that he has any real experience with either.

  This prototypic cyber world is an eclectic graveyard now housing Allen’s dreams and nightmares, initially abandoned because of its restrictive linearity. Allen designed it to serve as a tutorial bay off the noospheric river; calm water, perfect for launching.

  “God Almighty! What’s all that?”

  “Our lab rat has been busy.” Katajima adjusts the color converter.

  Sand-swept, naked, and alone, Allen lies in a fetal position under an angularly-impossible diamond building and a waterfall spouting from a tear in an azure sky. A vast, virtual desert surrounds him, populated by frivolous monstrosities, egotistically watermarked and gorily decorated. Like escaped creatures from a Dali painting, they lumber about on lanky legs unguided, trailing two-dimensional smoke, simulating a circumference to Allen’s navigable field. Despite the place’s geometrical perfection, it’s horrible…simply horrifying.

  Paul sighs. He looks to the nightmare’s engineer, Allen, whose body is unable to reintegrate his mind, calm water or not. “Mirror current visual, aural, and SIMHAP (i.e. simulated haptic/physical) inputs.” Paul futilely grasps Allen’s shoulder, reminding himself that this man, though seriously flawed, was not horribly unpleasant, and was worth exponentially more than Kim and his subhuman predecessors. “Scale-back all inputs and page Oni. We need all hands on deck.”

  The shaking stops.

  “I have him,” mutters Katajima, relieved. Katajima opens a line to the Oasis, where his words thunder and resonate like divine revelation.

  —ALLEN. THIS IS SHOUTA. YOU ARE GOING TO BE ALRIGHT. PAUL
AND I ARE GOING TO LOCALIZE—

  Allen intuits an interruption from his arid purgatory:

  —NOT ALRIGHT.

  On the holographic visualization of the Oasis, Allen stands up and looks around. His self-perception has taken creative license where his manhood is concerned, rendering him something of a vaudeville cartoon.

  Paul pushes Katajima out of the way. “He’s screwed,” he exclaims, through a mouthful of saliva. “Look at this.”

  On the glowing medical report between them pulses a death sentence. Allen’s EROS brain scan, centered by data-flows, reveals dying activity. His belfry greys and then darkens. The data stream Allen’d engaged in the CLOUD had exponentially increased his mental activity and virtual memory. There is now no real correlation between the synapses previously routed and those required to run his new intellect. Allen’s brain can no longer fit his mind. If they localize him, the balloon will destroy the container or pop in the process of their trying.

  Paul throws Katajima’s tablet into a “confidential-articles” box brimming with other bad ideas. The clang alarms Katajima, and prompts more gasps from the rafters.

  “Regardless of whether he gave consent, you’re the authority here and you knew better. He was expecting a steady flow in cyberspace, and you obliterated him with a flood. This is…“ Paul wags his finger at Allen, growing purple, “Mental rape, rape and murder.”

  “Do not throw the rule book at me, when it has yet to be written. Besides, you really are the last person here to pitch condemnation...”

  “Call your lawyer, Shouta. Forget what we are outside of work. I simply cannot and will not sit silent.”

  “Do not tangle me in your hate-love relationship with the work we are doing here. Allen might be fine, after all…”

  “Whatever you do—whatever happens—do not let him waste away in there. If Winchester consents, you can get Allen the space he needs, but by that time he’ll already have become a vegetable. His nervous system is fried.”

  “So that is it then? Just type ‘die,’ then hit enter?”