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by McClelland, Mark

  Raymond gaped in awe. He laughed and exclaimed that he had never had a meal like this. And he hadn't had an all-natural meal in months. Not a single pill lay on the table.

  Anya seated herself and raised her glass of wine to toast. "To the healing power of food."

  "Ha—to the healing power of food," repeated Raymond.

  The roast proved to be meltingly delicious, and was beautifully complemented by the soup. Raymond felt like a vagabond taken in from the cold. He savored every mouthful, closing his eyes and shaking his head, to the point that Anya just had to laugh.

  "Have you really never had a good old-fashioned home-cooked meal?"

  "Not like this. I mean, this is way better than the Thanksgiving meals at the homes." He was surprised by the word as it came out of his mouth; it slipped out so naturally. He sought to change the subject. "Do you eat like this often?"

  "Not exactly. I enjoy cooking, but it's so much nicer to cook for someone else. I might make myself one or two nice dishes, but not a whole meal like this. And I haven't made a roast in ages. What about you? What do you eat?"

  Raymond pictured his motor home kitchenette, the cupboards stocked with powders and pills, the freezer full of prepared foods. "Lots of shakes and juices and heat-and-eat dinners. Supplements. Chips. Fiber bars. And I eat out a lot, or bring home take-out."

  "Does your apartment have a full kitchen?"

  "No, I have a pretty small kitchen." In my apartment. As for my motor home, the word "kitchen" hardly applies.

  "Do you enjoy cooking?" asked Anya.

  "I never really learned to cook. My mother never cooked." He stopped abruptly, looked down at his plate.

  Anya nodded at this and took a mouthful of the roast. They ate in silence for a while. Anya poked at her food and squirmed slightly, then looked at Raymond and spoke softly.

  "I know you're not big on questions, but... you mentioned 'the homes'. It made me realize, I hardly know anything about you. I don't want to pry, but I can't help but wonder what you meant. You don't have to answer if you don't want to."

  Raymond hesitated. Still unsure of how Anya would fit into his plans, he didn't want to say too much or the wrong thing. He didn't want the conversation to get too far. But he ached, and her voice was the comforting hand he craved.

  "I didn't grow up in a nice family." He looked her in the eye as he answered her. The rare intensity with which he spoke made him feel as if he were bragging, towering over her, indulging a longstanding desire to speak pointedly on the topic of his separateness. As he tried to quell his emotions, he felt them transforming into a desperate, empty sadness. He swallowed and steeled himself, forcing nascent tears into submission.

  "I'm sorry," said Anya. "You don't have to talk about it. I'm sorry I brought it up."

  "No, it's okay." He looked her in the eye and surprised himself. "I want to be able to tell you. I've never told anyone."

  Raymond set his fork down and leaned forward, his elbows on his thighs, his hands clasped on his lap—as if he were watching tiny motions in the meat juice on his plate. With his tongue, he worked out a bit of beef stuck between eye tooth and incisor, then cleared his throat.

  "Well, I was born in Chicago. My mother was white and my father was Vietnamese, but born in Toronto. I grew up in a loft in Palmer Square, a poor little northwest neighborhood. My father was a v-world addict, and my mother was an alcoholic. My father could never hold a job, of course, and my mother got bored with jobs, so she never advanced. You know, just went from one to another. So there wasn't much money. I mean, I'm sure there was state money, but my father probably spent it online.

  "They didn't fight much, but it seemed like my father was always in his v-chamber, and my mother would pace outside it and say things loud enough so he might overhear them inside. Always with a drink in her hand. Or a bottle. She couldn't deal with having him so close and yet completely out of reach. Me, I could just pretend he didn't exist."

  "Oh, Raymond," cooed Anya, desire to help plain in her eyes. "V-world addiction is so tough on kids."

  "It was tougher on her. She drank all the time." Raymond shook his head, remembering the sight of her. "She usually ended up sitting on the floor with her back to the v-chamber door. It was her form of protest. This feeble protest, like she hoped he'd try to come out, and would get pissed at her for blocking the door. But when she sat so close, she could hear him inside. She would bang her elbow against the door sometimes when she heard something. I didn't realize it then, but he was probably having sex with some woman in v-space, and my mother could hear it. It drove her crazy."

  Anya was leaning her head on her hand by this point, clearly pained. She listened intently. The sadness in her eyes made Raymond remember his own past with a sense of compassion for himself that was utterly new to him.

  "Finally, I woke up one night, when I was seven, because I heard a glass break. I got up and looked into the living room, and there was my mom, sitting against the v-chamber. She'd hurled a glass across the room, and she was sitting against the door, sobbing, wearing this really slinky red nightie. You know, like I could see a lot more of her than I wanted to."

  Anya winced at this.

  "All of a sudden," he continued, "she scrambled to her feet and tried to open the door. She got it part way open, then the door was suddenly jerked out of her grasp, and it slammed shut. She slipped and fell to her knees, her face against the chamber, an old black Panasonic. She whaled on the door with her fists, then opened it again, this time quickly enough that she got it all the way open. She started into the chamber, and I remember she said, 'Baby, please let me in!' And then she came sailing out, backwards, and she fell against this white plastic egg chair we had. And I saw my father's bare arm reach out from the chamber and pull the door closed. I watched as my mom lay sobbing, her head on her arms, lying on floor; I watched until she fell asleep, and then I went back to bed. And I remember, I lay awake and stared at the ceiling. I thought about the fact that my dad really did exist, and I tried to imagine what better place he must be in, that he always wanted to be there, and I wondered why my mother couldn't be there with him."

  Raymond lifted his elbows onto the table. He leaned forward and touched his lips and chin to his hands, trying to stop them from shaking.

  "And you've never talked with anyone about all this?"

  He shook his head. "There was the State of Illinois guy, I guess, when he asked me questions. But that was different." His voice started to break.

  Anya got up, came around the table, and hugged him from behind. She held him tight, saying "it's okay, it's okay." Through his watery eyes, Raymond saw that some of her long black hair was lying in the beef juice on his plate. He lifted it away and sniffed, then moved to stand up.

  "I should go."

  "No, no, no! That's the last thing you should do." She took hold of his shirt sleeve and led him into the living room, where she sat him down on the love seat. "Now stay put. Stay boy... stay." He sniffled and laughed. She sat down next to him, her feet tucked underneath her, and started to smooth his hair and rub his neck.

  "I'm sorry," said Raymond. "We should finish dinner."

  "Don't you worry about that. I can always reheat it." She petted him for a while. He was embarrassed that he had almost cried.

  "So," she asked, "how did you end up in the state homes?"

  He took a deep breath.

  "My father left us to be with this Asian stripper named Mako, in Miami. I remember my mother telling me that over and over... that he ran off to be with an Asian stripper named after a shark." Anya kept petting him, making sounds of understanding but not saying a word. "So it was just me and my mom for a while. She drank like crazy. She would lock herself in her room and drink and cry. She didn't go to work for days, and she wouldn't answer when calls came in. I don't think she even called in sick. When she did go in, they fired her, and she came straight back, got piss drunk, and cried herself to sleep. When it came time to pay the rent, she filed f
or state aid. So a guy from the state came to look into her affairs, and he could see she was a wreck. He took us to a shelter and asked me questions about my home life. I thought he might send me to a better place if things sounded really bad, so I didn't hold anything back and maybe exaggerated here and there. The state took custody of me and became my legal guardian, and I was put in a home in Joliet. And that was that. The rest of my childhood, I was raised by the State of Illinois."

  "Wow. I had no idea. That's a really tough childhood. It's amazing that you've gotten where you are."

  She stood up from the love seat and went to the table. Raymond found himself instantly missing her, wanting her, watching her butt as she walked away.

  "Do you want to eat more? You could eat there at the coffee table?"

  "Sure. That sounds great. I'd hate to let it go to waste."

  She brought their plates and glasses and bowls to the coffee table.

  "I'm sorry," said Anya. "I know you didn't come over for a therapy session. We should probably talk about something else."

  They didn't. Silence passed between them, and Raymond was fine with the silence, happy to have Anya near him. They finished their meal. She casually put her hand on his thigh, an expression of their sense of connection.

  "Thanks for the meal, Anya. That was really, really good."

  She smiled and thanked him for the compliment. "More wine?" she offered. He nodded. She refilled their glasses from the canister at the dining room table, brought the glasses back to the coffee table, then collected the dirty dishes and carried them off to the kitchen.

  Raymond sipped his wine. He looked at the glass, the smooth surface of the wine—he wasn't shaking anymore. In fact, he felt a sense of peace, and he realized that it was because he had let Anya into his world. "A luxury I can't afford," he muttered.

  Anya returned to the couch and settled in next to him.

  "So," she asked with a gentle tone, "what were you working on this afternoon?"

  Raymond pictured himself uploading, and he starting thinking about the possibility of the scanner breaking. "Persona stuff," he answered thoughtlessly. Perhaps worse than the risk of complete scanner failure was the possibility of a flawed scan, the errors undetected. He was vaguely aware of what Anya had asked. He sought some additional response, but his new train of thought had taken over.

  "What sorts of problems do you think we might have with Bento?" he asked.

  "All sorts of things. There are the usual scan problems. Unexpected patterns in his nervous system that cause the nanoscanners to halt or collide. The scan could miss some portion of the brain without our realizing it. Segments of memory could be lost, some percentage of the corpus callosum could be bypassed—millions of things could go wrong. Bento's brain is considerably more complex than any we've scanned so far. But, personally, I think the neural scan is so ingeniously simple that it's pretty much foolproof. Chimp, human—I think the neural scan is basically the same."

  Raymond nodded, listening closely as Anya went on.

  "I'm more worried about capturing the behavior of the hormones, neuropeptides, and neurotransmitters. This isn't a true physiological scan, after all. Sure, we're gobbling up everything as we go, but the nervous architecture is the only thing we're really mapping one-to-one. The rest of the data from the scan are employed statistically, to inform our simulation of the non-neural physiology. We don't have dopamine and serotonin flowing through these computer brains, and our simulation of their behavior could be way too simplistic for a primate brain. Uploaded Minnie seems like a well-adjusted dog, but the triggers for release and inhibition of neurotransmitters are a good deal more complex in a primate brain. We may get all the neurons in the right place, wired up just fine, yet completely fail to capture Bento's socially complex mind. And if we can't fine-tune the simulation quickly enough, Bento's mind could start to destroy itself, in a sense, as neural connections fade away and abnormalities arise."

  "Isn't is possible to make a backup of the neural architecture at the time of the scan and revert to that neural backup once the physiological simulation has been ironed out?"

  "Well, if we could cleanly back up and restore an NBC, that would be an option. But what are you going to back up to? There's no backup process for a neuristor-based computer. IBM is working on it, but they keep pushing back the availability date."

  "At any given moment, every neuristor has a known value, right? Why can't it be backed up?"

  "Sure, at a given point in time, every neuristor has a measurable value, but there's no way to tell each one to save state all at once. It's a massively decentralized, asynchronously self-adjusting computer, constantly attending to its computational efficiency."

  "So, there's no way to freeze state?"

  "Freeze state?"

  Embarrassment engulfed Raymond's mind. He was only now realizing how basic a difference there was between an NBC and the computers he knew so well. His work had been solely in the traditional realm; only now was he glimpsing the depths of his ignorance. As if the mere utterance of his question weren't enough, here was her response, one of amazement at the uninformed nature of his question.

  "An NBC," explained Anya, "has no central clock. Every neuristor acts asynchronously. It's like a network of two hundred billion nodes, each one a simple computer, capable of establishing thousands of trillions of network links. The pulse of an NBC is the pulse of the universe, the march of time. There's no clock to stop, and there's presently no way of broadcasting a 'stop' message to every neuristor. You could pull the plug, but that won't get you any closer to making a backup."

  "Then how does IBM plan to make a backup?"

  "Basically, they plan to add a meta-level to the whole machine—a synchronized reporting layer, interwoven throughout all two hundred billion neuristors, able to record a snapshot of the entire graph. But it would be more than just a reporting layer, because the process can go in the opposite direction, too—you prime the meta-level with state information, then tell it to load. In theory, the brain should suddenly undergo a complete change of mind and proceed from backup as if nothing had happened. But I'm skeptical."

  Anya shifted, bringing a knee up onto the couch. It pressed into Raymond's leg; he scooted away to give her room.

  "Well, then how do you load the NBC in the first place? I mean, I know how the data gets to the NBC, but how does it find its way into the right neuristors?"

  "By applying the neural patterns as they're recorded by the nanoscanners. It's a mess, really." Anya shifted again, moving closer to Raymond. "There are a million or so entry points into the NBC 'brain', into which you start to pump the pattern data from the scan. The neuristors are set up to receive the patterns. What you end up with is an awful mess at first, until the patterns have all been completely applied. It's kind of like growing millions of tree structures, from the roots up, and expecting the leaves of the trees to mesh. If there's a flicker of consciousness at any point during that process, it's going to be one confused mind. Kind of like waking up in the midst of a dream. But everything seems to iron itself out okay. It may be registered by the mind as a bizarre trauma, but it shouldn't be—the patterns are such that nothing should make it into any form of memory until the final moments. And it can't really be considered a trauma if the experience isn't translated into memory—or directly damaging."

  "So the patterns are recorded, right? I mean, during the scan, you record the patterns so that they can be pumped into the NBC?"

  "Not exactly. The statistical summary of the non-neural physiological scan is recorded, but the neural architecture is never completely stored. It's stored in segments that roughly correspond to nuclei, modules, and lobes of the brain. Those segments are fed in upon completion. If the scan were to pause for even a second, already-scanned segments could become deformed, and essential links might never be made. But this hasn't happened since the fruit-fly scans."

  "Okay, then the segments are recorded as they're formed, and then dumped.
But if you could record all the segments, in the appropriate order, couldn't you then make a backup of the scan? You may not be able to make backups during the life of a mind, but at least you could have a backup of the source mind, from the scan."

  Anya thought about this for a while. "I suppose," she admitted hesitantly. "I guess we've never seen the need."

  "Well, you haven't had any disasters since the fruit flies. And it's never been you in that scanner, has it?" Raymond's voice cracked slightly.

  "No. Obviously."

  Raymond realized that his voice had grown louder, and he feared that he might be raising suspicions in Anya's mind. "But if it were... I mean, what about poor Bento? He's been a good chimp all his life, right? If we're going to scan his mind, don't you think that making a backup of the scan is a reasonable precaution?"

  Anya reflected for a time and then finally reached out and put a hand on his shoulder. He realized that he couldn't move away from her; through the course of their conversation, she had shifted into his subspace so many times that he was backed against the arm of the loveseat. Her touch caused him to tighten up, then to relax somewhat, the tension of her proximity broken.

  "That's brilliant. You know," she said, "I don't think I've ever seen you take such a passionate interest in a topic."

  He looked away from her briefly, collecting himself. She awaited a response, an explanation. Her silence allowed him mental space in which to formulate some appropriately cool statement of position. He was aware of a lesson he had gleaned from years of deception: the closer to the truth you can come without touching on it, the more plausible your false position. His motives were large in his mind; he sought to chip off some key element of them, something that would serve his purpose. In parallel arose the possibility of saying something that would fit with Anya's role in his planned deceptions.