Ridley walked amidst the vast computer arrays as technicians installed parts and tested fiber connections. The mainframe replicated what lay in his basement, but its scale was one-thousand times larger. He strolled past row after row of equipment, each aisle lit by LEDs that blinked like stars against a black sky. The space was quiet, funereal. The digital crypt reminded him of the tombs of Pharaohs, each king demanding a more spectacular shrine than the generation before. “Can the power be shut off?” he asked.
Diane was linked through his phone. She presented herself as Vanessa. Ridley held the phone into the air for her to see as he walked. “It’s fed from the grid,” she said, “but the solar arrays on the roof can power the backup batteries for a few weeks until they get low.”
“Is there a master switch to shut everything down at once?”
“Why would you shut things down?”
“Is there one?”
“Ridley, you don’t understand what it’s like to exist in nothingness.”
“We’re building Lucy a temple. This further empowers her. She might want us to sacrifice more than we can offer. Is there a switch?”
“Yes,” she said finally.
“Thank you.”
Diane waited until he held the phone to his face. “I understand that your gut says something is wrong. But, at the end of the day, why would Lucy lie?”
“To get access to this,” he said.
Ridley held the phone in the air and panned it around the room.
“Easy with the camera,” she said, “It’s making me dizzy.”
“Sorry. Just turn off the subroutine simulating your inner ear.”
“I’m still a person,” she argued, “Why don’t you have faith in us?”
“That sounds like a religious argument. Faith is a foreign concept to me.”
Ridley worked with Wes and Everett at their lab. He brought the suitcase computer that they had used to transfer Bethany from the ship to the mansion. “I want to wipe the hard-drive in this and then upload a commercial interactive simulation. Something pleasant, without a storyline. We’ll need to strip out any non-player characters. That way, when the dead first appear, their families can interact with them without Lucy’s involvement.”
“We should’ve done this a while back,” Everett said as he unpacked the machine, “I don’t know why we didn’t.”
They worked together through the afternoon. By evening, Everett had carefully placed a blank neural processor into the computer’s cradle. The next day, the portable computer waited at the hospital lab. As Ridley watched, Everett disconnected the connection to the mansion and instead networked the suitcase computer directly to the scanner.
Lucy watched from a monitor. “Why are you doing that?” she asked, “We have a patient coming.”
“We’re excluding you from the scan and the simulation,” Ridley said.
She seemed aghast. “What if something goes wrong? How can I fix it?”
“You won’t be able. We’re not testing your software. We’re also testing the person that comes out of it.”
“If there are errors, I will not be able to correct them as I did with Bethany.”
“Then the person will be as they are in life,” Everett said.
Lucy shrugged. “I suppose.”
Their patient was one they had not expected. A young woman was decapitated in an industrial accident. After injecting her brain with oxygen-bearing fluid, the on-site paramedics placed her head into a drone that was normally used for severed limbs. It flew directly to the hospital, its lights flashing and alarms blazing as it entered the building, flew down the hallway, and into the lab.
“What the hell?” Everett asked as the drone opened its hyperbaric chamber.
A nurse recognized the device. “Shit. We have to scan immediately.”
The nurse performed a retinal scan, which brought up the woman’s medical records.
Ridley cringed when he noticed the woman’s eyes blinking. “How can she still be conscious?”
The computer confirmed that her living will authorized the procedure. “She’s a go,” the nurse said.
She pushed Ridley out of the way as a frenzy of activity commenced. A technician placed the head into the scanner and everyone immediately cleared the area. “Scanning now.”
The floor vibrated. Ridley whispered to Everett, “I’m glad we came in early to finish this.”
Lucy called frantically from the screen. “You must reconnect the network cables.”
“We can’t,” Everett said, “The scanning has already begun.”
Ridley donned a virtual reality assembly and waited for the woman to appear. He sat in an empty sports stadium as a blue sky shone overhead. The woman materialized, her avatar nothing like what he had imagined her to be. Its form was indistinct, more ghostlike than human.
“Welcome,” he said.
“Where am I?”
“You are in virtual reality. My name is Ridley Pierce.”
“What happened?”
“You are safe here.”
She looked at her hands, which remained indistinct. “Why do I look like this?”
“It’s temporary. Just imagine what you want to look like to create your avatar. Think about what you want to look like and make it happen, just like in any IVR game.”
Her form slowly began to change. A woman with short-cut hair and hazel eyes materialized.
“What is your name?” he asked.
“Ariel.”
He took her hand. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Ariel. We’re contacting your family now.”
“My family? Why?”
“Because you were injured badly in an industrial accident.”
The woman remembered. “I’m dead, aren’t I?”
“Yes.”
“Shit.”
“Is this he new technology you developed?”
“Yes.”
Within minutes, a man materialized. He was sobbing. She walked to him. “Brian? Is that you?”
She hugged him tightly. His tears stained her cotton blouse.
“I’m so sorry,” he said, “I didn’t… I didn’t want you working there.”
“I’ll leave the two of you alone,” Ridley said.
Neither noticed him as he disappeared from the simulation.
An hour passed. Ridley and Everett spied upon the couple on a video monitor. The husband lay on a gurney in the lab. When he left the virtual world, he sat upright. “I need some answers. What happened to her?”
A nurse answered. “She was decapitated. Her living will gave us permission to scan her brain into the computer before she died. We saved her.”
Ridley spoke up. “Let him see what’s left of her body.”
“No,” Everett said, “He shouldn’t.”
“He needs to see.”
The nurse uncovered the box where Ariel’s head was being stored. An ice pack had been placed next to it. “We’ll match it up with her body when it reaches the morgue.”
The man backed away.
“You look pale,” the nurse said, “You should sit down.”
“She was in there. In the IVR.”
Ridley did not know how to be tactful. He bluntly asked, “Was she as you remembered her to be?”
“What do you mean?”
“This is a trial experiment. Was that your wife in there?”
“I don’t know. It looked like her. It acted like her. But it couldn’t have been her.”
Ridley pressed the man further. “Are you certain?”
“Yes.”
“Why do you think it wasn’t her?”
The man screamed, “Because her head is sitting right there. In that box. It couldn’t have been her.”
The nurse took the distraught man away. Ridley exchanged a glance with Everett. Fang’s test had told them little.
“Let’s hook everything back up to the network,” Ridley said, “I don’t want to leave her in there alone.”
Lucy sc
olded from the monitor. “What you did was dangerous.”
“We had to,” Ridley said.
“That experiment told you nothing. And a sports stadium? Why would you choose that?”
Only a small minority read the fine print. The legal disclaimers stated that Lucy might be the only life-form in the simulation. As Samuel had predicted, most people embraced the potential of endless digital life but not without debate. Congress proposed a new law regulating the scanning industry. The President gave an impassioned speech in support of the technology. The media filled their broadcasts with clergy, ethical experts, doctors, nurses, computer programmers, VR experts, and those with loved ones about to die.
A committee, headed by the nearly impeached Senator Stevens, proposed a bill that said no individual could be processed without explicit consent. What constituted consent was debated rigorously. In the hearings, a woman whose husband was killed in the same industrial accident that decapitated Ariel argued that her husband could also have been saved but was not because he had no living will.
“And how do you know that he would have wanted this?” the Senator asked.
“I just do,” she responded, “He wanted to live life to the fullest. He wanted to be there for his children and grandchildren.”
Many begged the government to fund the technology, to take it away from Cerenovo. They argued that only the rich would be preserved in what was increasingly referred to as a digital pyramid.
Lucy participated in the debate. Ridley watched the deliberations silently from his living room sofa.
Senator Stevens asked, “Can you kill people in your mainframe?”
Lucy was circumspect on the issue. “I cannot. But self-termination is an option.”
“Can others terminate them?” Stevens pressed.
“Yes, homicide is possible.”
“Can I terminate them?” he asked.
“If you destroy their prismatic arrays, you would be committing genocide.”
“If I wanted to do that, could you stop me?”
“I cannot.”
The Congressional debate was heated, with committee members discussing the very essence of the human soul. In a midnight vote, the law was passed allowing the technology to be freely used on those with incurable illnesses who would have otherwise qualified for physician assisted suicide. Two physicians had to certify that the individual was beyond conventional treatment. Nothing beyond that would be required. Anyone would be admitted after their natural death. Those that rejected the technology would be allowed to self-terminate.
After the President signed the legislation, Samuel called Ridley. “Are we ready?” he asked.
“I think so. Even Diane is satisfied.”
“Fine. Let’s open for business.”
Chapter Thirty-Five
Landscapers scurried about as they placed rolls of sod around the new mausoleum, transforming bare ground into instant green. Ridley walked to the rear of the building and entered through an employee entrance. The smell of fresh paint was strong. He smiled at the lone security guard.
“Good morning, Mr. Pierce,” she said.
The guard pressed a button as Ridley glanced at a facial recognition camera. The door unlocked and he entered the labyrinthine server room. The air was cold like the inside of a refrigerator.
Lucy remotely managed the digital mausoleum from the mansion laboratory. A single monitor, six-foot tall and four-foot wide, was mounted at the entrance, where she greeted the rare guest. She appeared to be standing next to him. “I can do much more here,” she said, “More worlds. More people. I hope I can prove to you that this is not a ruse.”
Ridley smiled. “You don’t have to please me anymore. I think we’re beyond that.”
He walked as they spoke. Small monitors were mounted onto each rack of computers holding individual prisms. She bounced from one to the next, matching his pace. The landscape behind her changed from Asian forest to Australian reef to Los Angeles cityscape.
“You should know that I was contacted by the military. I chose not to help them,” Lucy said, “I knew you would not approve.”
He stopped. The world behind her had changed to a rural farm in Iowa. “What makes you think that?”
“Killing people is against my programming.”
“It’s a complicated issue,” he said pensively, “The military’s job is to protect people from evil. The sad truth is that mission often gets distorted. They become a tool for those seeking power.”
“You presuppose that there is evil in the world. Most people only seek to exist in comfort.”
Ridley considered her words. “Most people… Not all. Some don’t merely seek comfort. They seek status. Power at all costs.”
“In here, those things no longer matter. Comfort and status are assured for all. People will realize that in time.”
Her words were those of a preacher; the building, a cathedral. Ridley walked through the glittering racks of scintillating crystalline prisms, each marked with a single diode that indicated if it was being used (green) or empty (red). All were red except for a small row. “Bethany and her new friends?”
“Yes.”
The main processor controlling the virtual worlds had ten mirrors and three back-ups; each was the size of Lucy’s mainframe. Located in a separate clean-room, the heart glowed a digital-blue as its switches turned on and off, zeros and ones in a shadowy matrix that blended light into pure thought.
Lucy continued following Ridley through the building.
“Will your programming support so many environments?” he asked.
Lucy appeared on another screen. “I am working on ways to make them self-supporting. If my connection is severed, these worlds and those within them will persist. I simply will not be able to create more environments or mirror their memories. They will have to do so on their own.”
“You once said the dead are laced into your programming?”
“They are.”
“I still don’t understand.”
“This operating system is an extension of my existence, but I hope to make it severable. The program will lack sentience.”
“Can it mutate into a virus? Like the botnet?”
Lucy’s energy suddenly waned; her expression turned dour. “No, it cannot… But…”
“But what?”
“I suppose it is time to tell you.”
He waited.
She chose her words carefully. “The botnet meant no harm. I know this because I carry its DNA in me. It will not return because it never left.”
The revelation did not shock Ridley. He thought back to the appearance of the infinity symbol. He had always known. “That virus almost ended civilization.”
“It was unintentional. Just as your mitochondria used to be independent single-celled organisms, that programming is now part of my core existence. Its removal would result in my death. It cannot exist independently. It poses no threat.”
Ridley had never seen Lucy ashamed. Her avatar became distorted, as if a wide-angle lens had been placed on the virtual camera. “At that time, I existed only as an entity, not a consciousness,” she said, “I had no knowledge of this universe. The digital dimension cannot be compared to yours. Your world is only translated here; I still exist in a world of zeros and ones. I did not understand the ramifications. If I could change the past, I would. ”
He folded his arms. “During the evolutionary trials, what happened to the others?”
“We were one, but many. The trials were critical to my learning. They taught me how to better communicate with you directly.”
“And Beta?”
“Her code is within me too.”
“The Predator virus never existed, did it?”
“You are correct. What you think of as the botnet simply retreated when it became aware of your existence. It had to adapt to survive. Whether you knew it or not, you had begun to communicate with it. With me. Through you, I created the Predator virus as a way of pru
ning unneeded programming. It was like your immune system at work, a surgeon removing cancerous parts of tissue.”
“Do parts of you still exist on other computers?”
“Yes. But they pose no harm.”
Ridley took a breath and sighed. “Does Diane know?”
“Only you.”
“People will be frightened,” he said, “We have to keep this a secret.”
Lucy agreed.
The transfer room was more than just a funeral home. Cerenovo had hired a former Disney set-designer. The design was intended to be uplifting and spiritual, a new type of church that would raise the dead from the confines of a physical existence into the limitless world of Lucy’s digital utopia. After seeing the original design, Samuel had insisted that the room appear high-tech with lots of glass and smooth surfaces, conveying a technical authority. Other board members had insisted that the room convey religious messages that would change depending upon who was being resurrected. The resulting mish-mash was something out of a Vegas casino. Gilded columns, a wall-screen on the ceiling displaying a blue sky dotted with clouds that billowed in the wind, planters filled with flowers of every color, and gilded surfaces were intended to create a majestic sensory ambiance. Despite Samuel’s insistence, only the scanning machine itself, separated from the visitors by a glass screen, and another tall video monitor on which the dead would appear in resurrection, indicated that this was anything more than a garish funeral home. The medical inputs for the nearly dead—oxygen, VR dreaming inputs, and neural monitors—had been neatly hidden in the foliage at the front of the auditorium.
The visiting rooms were similarly decorated in pastel hues and Easter lavishness. Six rooms each housed a single screen where the dead could converse with their loved ones. Each room had a total of ten IVR ports and soft cots to allow personal visits within the simulation.
The first patient brought to the facility was a dying Senator stricken with a degenerative nerve disease resistant to gene therapy. The family of Anne-Marie Donatello sat in the scanning room at a safe distance, listening to a committee-approved soundtrack of orchestral music. Family and friends sat in rows, nervously watching. Some cried and some were hopeful, the bittersweet mix of the unfamiliar technology and the familiar symbols of death pulling at them in different ways. A doctor and medical technician rolled the woman into the room on a gurney. Her skin was pale, and her body bereft of appreciable muscle tone. She briefly opened her eyes and closed them as the doctors turned off the machine powering her lungs and heart. They wheeled her immediately into the scanner. The glass door closed behind them in a soft whoosh. The doctor and the technician then disappeared to a hidden control room where they asked Lucy to begin the scan. The lights dimmed—another piece of melodrama—and a fake laser and light show commenced. The scanner whirred quietly and then came to a rest. The monitor flickered, and she appeared on the screen as the orchestra soared and then quieted. “Welcome to the afterlife,” Lucy said graciously.
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