Upload

by McClelland, Mark

  He wasn't sure why he had written them out on paper in the first place. He was vaguely aware of some romantic association with scrawling out one's grand schemes on paper, but it was more a matter of wanting to be completely safe from hacking. Whatever the reason, it no longer made sense. He had to accept that he was now just as susceptible to physical investigation as he was to the prying software of police hackers.

  His thought process was again derailed, his focus falling back to the beaker.

  o-------------------------------o

  Bento had been undergoing psychological tests for almost two weeks now, and they were going extremely well. Tests of his reaction to the sight of a snake confirmed that his emotional memory remained intact; he leapt and climbed to a high spot in his habitat, where he jumped and screamed and threw loose objects at the snake. His diet and sleep habits conformed to those he had exhibited in biological form. His gestures and moods appeared similar. He had even returned to playing with the colored boxes, his most favored toys.

  Raymond pushed off from the mini-v and started to pace slowly, his arms still on his chest. In less than an hour, at 1:30 PM, the team would attempt to upload a second chimp, a female named Molly. Molly was to be the first of the Zootorium chimps. Via his access to Bob's personal computer network, Raymond knew that Bob had just put in a request for more chimps, though he had promised Zootorium only two. Which was why Raymond didn't feel bad about the catastrophic upload failure that was soon to be entered into the scanner logs.

  His pacing grew more intense. He ran a hand through his hair, struggling to keep his mind from jumping uselessly from thought to thought. It was a source of great anxiety to him that Murray had purchased an airbus ticket to Ann Arbor. The timing was especially irksome—Scorpio had notified Raymond of Murray's travel plans earlier that morning. Murray was due into Ann Arbor by airbus the next morning. As if his mind weren't already spinning fast enough with the details of his plans for the night. Now this.

  What exactly was it that had triggered Murray's visit to Ann Arbor? The day Raymond's lurker was tagged, he had dismantled his State Police listening network. As a result, he couldn't be sure how much they knew. But it was obvious he was their hottest lead.

  He ran through the saga of his fraud. Each month and year that passed made the events seem hazier and hazier, more safely distant. Self-disgust arose within him each time he recalled his one grave error—not giving the nephews full power-of-attorney on Tate's emergency account. It was the money therein, locked away from them, that motivated them to investigate the fate of their wealthy uncle.

  The mistake had really been threefold, which made it all the worse. First, there was the issue of not granting the nephews full power of attorney. This was a matter of a clerical oversight on his part—he had merely failed to fill out the forms correctly. Second, he forgot to check the anonymous mailbox that he had set up to allow the bank to contact Tate, who was ostensibly off in some remote tropical location with the girl of his dreams. Had Raymond checked that damned mailbox in time, he would have found a message from the bank informing him that the nephews had attempted to access the account and failed, and he would have been able to grant them access. Third, he had been ignorant of the bank's regulations. He wasn't anymore. Once a missing person report on an account holder had been active for over a year, that account holder was locked out of the account, unable to make modifications to or withdrawals from the account without visiting a bank outlet in person and passing a series of identification tests. A missing person report was filed for Tate a month after Tate supposedly ran off with his dream girl, and the account was sealed a year later.

  Now the nephews wanted access to it. In order to gain access, they either had to wait another two years—at which time Tate would automatically be declared dead—or they had to provide proof that Tate was already dead. And the nephews weren't willing to wait.

  Had I avoided any of these mistakes, the nephews would have had gotten access to the account and gone on their merry way.

  Raymond struggled to stop dwelling on the past. He needed to face his current circumstances with a clear head. Hope flashed through his mind—what if Murray's trip to Ann Arbor were a coincidence?

  "Great," he murmured. "Delude yourself to safety."

  o-------------------------------o

  A text message came in on Raymond's wrist relay—a message from Anya addressed to him and Suma. It was time to prepare for the scan. One set of anxious thoughts replaced another, and the subconscious agitation grew more intense. As he closed up his office, looking for the millionth time for anything that might give him away, he imagined himself as a digital life-form, safely residing in a hi-jacked communications satellite, orbiting the Earth. Not wanting to be late, he sighed deeply, resigned himself to the risk of having missed something, and made his way toward the Scan Lab.

  "Hey, Raymond."

  Raymond turned around to see Suma walking quickly to catch up with him. Raymond stopped to wait for her. She smiled at him. As frazzled as he was, it was still nice to see her—her air of control and good cheer was contagious, and he found himself smiling back at her, releasing his worries into her warm gaze.

  "So," she said, "it's time for me to learn your system."

  "Oh, yeah, that's right." Raymond had forgotten that he and Suma were going to go through his procedures together during this upload. She would be taking over his responsibilities associated with the actual upload process, and Tim would pick up any maintenance work on the other software tools that Raymond had created.

  She caught up with him and they walked down the hall together.

  "I can see you've really been thinking about it," she joked.

  "Yeah, well—you've already seen most of it. It's really not that big a deal. You even helped build some of it."

  "True, but I'll feel better once we've gone through a live run together. I was looking through your 3-D display for scan and upload progress. It's really good."

  "Oh, thanks. It was just a modification to a 3-D model I made for a v-world a few years ago."

  "Well, it's really good." She laughed mildly on the word "really". "And it's a touch that nobody else would have added. I was talking with Anya and Jean-Michel about your feedback display work. They're so impressed. I mean, you do in a day or two what it would take anyone else on this team weeks to do—we just don't have your visuals background. It's really a shame you're leaving."

  "Oh, you'll still have Tim. He's good with visuals."

  Suma looked at Raymond with a raised eyebrow. "He's good at goofing off."

  "There is that..." As Raymond trailed off, he placed his hand on the fingerprint scanner at the entrance to the Scan Lab. The doors slid open and he and Suma stepped through.

  The Scan Lab was a fairly large lab. From his 3-D mapping work, Raymond knew it to be forty-two feet by thirty-eight feet, give or take a few inches. It was a brightly lit windowless room at the heart of the building. There were two doorways—the one through which Raymond and Suma had just entered, and the one that led to the animal holding chamber. In the center of the room, under a track of spotlights, was the scanner. It was a sleek piece of equipment, a long charcoal gray pedestal with a transparent yellow dome cover that was open at one end. Around the perimeter of the room were mobile computer stations, where team members could monitor the upload. Dominating one wall was a floor-to-ceiling display, currently showing a live feed of Bento's living environment. Bento could be seen on a low tree limb, looking idly down at the ground as Rona, a female a-life chimp, preened him.

  Roughly half the team was already present in the lab. The scientists on the team all wore white lab coats. Raymond spotted Anya, standing at her usual station on the other side of the room, next to the main wall display. Ellen was with her, the two of them discussing holographic charts. Raymond crossed through the center of the room, where Darryl and Kim stood at one end of the scanner, running through results. Kim looked up at him.

  "Our final
run, eh Kim?" asked Raymond as he passed her.

  "Yeah," she responded, "and just when we've got the whole thing running smoothly..."

  Raymond reached Anya's station, and Suma came up next to him. Anya and Ellen continued their discussion. They were going over test results for the simulated physiology that would become Molly's body, once her mind was uploaded. They ran through details, confirming one result after another. Raymond loved seeing Anya in her lab coat—he loved the air of authority it gave her.

  "Hey, Anya, what's up?" asked Raymond.

  She looked up at him, meeting his eyes with a look of distraction, her brow slightly furrowed. "Oh, I just wanted you two to know everything's on schedule. You should go ahead and run through the controller tests." She looked back down at her screen.

  Raymond lingered for a moment, then crossed back past the scanner to the controller station. This was the only fixed station in the room, the others being mobile for reuse throughout the building. The controller station consisted of a single adjustable touch-screen, atop a charcoal gray pedestal that matched the base of the scanner.

  "Okay," said Raymond. He touched the screen to activate it, and it lit up with a complex array of controls and feedback panels. He grabbed the top of the screen, pulled it up a couple inches, and tilted it forward. "This, obviously, is the control station. Everything you have to do can be done from here."

  Raymond ran through a series of tests to make sure the scanner controls functioned properly, explaining to Suma the purpose of each test, what results to expect, and how to deal with failures. As he described the various possible trouble spots, he imagined performing the upload on himself. From the beginning, he had accounted for the possibility that the upload would have to be performed without human interaction.

  "If you look through my code," he explained, "you'll see that everything has a fully-automatic mode. I've even created automated procedures to handle nearly any failure case that can occur. But, by default, it's set to await manual confirmation or override. The auto version is there for the sake of testing—so I can force a hardware failure and see how the system will respond without having to be in two places at once."

  Suma nodded, accepting this explanation without question. All tests came out positive.

  "Okay," continued Raymond. "Next comes code analysis, to make sure the code base for the scan and upload is the right one. Obviously, we don't want any untested code to be included in the build for a run like this. In fact, in this case, everything should match the code base used for Bento's scan. This is probably the most important step in the entire process."

  Raymond ran code analyses on all the control modules, smiling to himself as version control falsely confirmed that the feedback and logging modules had not been modified since Bento's scan. Why, that's odd, he joked to himself with familiar self-satisfaction—I modified them just last night.

  "So, everything checks out fine, and that's about it. Now, you just hit this icon or say 'Home', and it takes you back to the main control panel."

  Ten minutes prior to the scan, the doors to the animal holding chamber opened, and Doug and Margaret wheeled Molly in on a gurney. Her prone, motionless body was spotted with derms, feeding a mix of anesthetics and nanoscanners into her bloodstream and throughout her body. By the time the scan started, she would be so thoroughly anesthetized that no straps would be needed to hold her still during the scan. For his own upload, Raymond had imagined himself being inside the scanner before applying the derms and self-anesthetizing. But now, looking at how many derms were on her, he realized he would be too cramped inside the scanner to reach his legs and feet. He would probably have to do it all sitting on the gurney, then have one of his robots push him into the scanner and initiate the scan.

  Bob Wells entered just a few steps behind Molly. As Doug lined her up for transfer onto the scanning table, Bob stepped over and placed a hand on her forehead. "Be a good girl for me, Molly."

  At five minutes, the wall display that had shown the feed from Bento's v-world switched to a five minute countdown. Molly was transferred to the scanner, the top section of the gurney sliding directly onto the table. Raymond watched the motion closely, in anticipation of his having to train one of his robots to do the same.

  "Bring up the monitors, Raymond," said Bob.

  Raymond pointed out to Suma a button on the main control panel, then pressed it. Large holographic displays on either side of the scanner lit up with spinning chimp-shaped grids showing the positional status of the nanoscanners. The team had found that the scanners behaved somewhat differently from body to body, making it essential that the actual scan be triggered at the correct moment. With help from Anya, Raymond had trained the controlling computer to recognize the correct moment, but Bob liked to maintain override power, in case of abnormal conditions. From the holographic monitors, it could be seen that the nanoscanners had made their way through most of Molly's body. Those that had come in contact with the nervous system sent off signals indicating that they recognized their position in the body. These signals were sensed by the scanner and portrayed as magenta points in Raymond's holographic displays. Molly's nervous system took shape before them, a complex network of threads throughout the body, all leading to the brain.

  "Ready on the ignition, there, Raymond?" asked Bob.

  Raymond nodded in response. His left middle finger was poised over the scan-initiation button, while his right index finger was poised over the abort button. Just as the holographic displays showed complete pre-scan positioning of the nanoscanners, the voice of the controlling computer called out a three second abort period prior to automatic scan initiation. Raymond looked to Bob, who gave a positive nod, and he lifted his hands from the control panel. He was pleased to see his automated system work properly yet again.

  "Commencing scan," announced the computer.

  The whole nervous system scan would take about thirty seconds, and the scan on the rest of the body—which would be used to verify and possibly to enhance the existing physiological simulation—would take a total of about two minutes. Molly's brain death, a somewhat subjective occurrence, was announced by the controlling computer just moments into the scan. Raymond waited apprehensively for his false failure report. He wondered again whether the scan failure would be a significant setback to the team. They would probably chase their tails for quite some time, trying to figure out what the hell went wrong. And they would probably end up replacing some of the hardware components in the scanner. But would it be considered a transgression of animal rights? His simulated raid on the lab would make it look like a big animal rights issue, but would it actually become one? Until a few moments before, Molly had been terminally ill, as Bento had been prior to his scan. Bob had argued that the upload could be considered a medical procedure, an attempt to extend the life of the animal. Given the apparent success of the scans performed thus far, his argument had been upheld. But with this seeming failure, would his argument be dragged under the public spotlight and reconsidered? Might the team be charged with malpractice by the Lansing Zoo? Not likely, thought Raymond, as the procedure was accepted as being experimental, and had been fully authorized by Molly's legal guardian—the city of Lansing, Michigan.

  The clock ticked away. Reports on the progress of the scan were promising. An occasional two-beat vibration in his wrist relay indicated to Raymond that his agents were successfully recording the scan data, rapidly encrypting it and socking it away in computers all over the Net, using a dozen "verysafe" hacked accounts, for later reassembly and upload—upload into one of the NBCs that Raymond planned to steal that night, under the falsified auspices of an Animal Liberation Army (ALA) break-in. Everything was in place. At 11:00 PM, he would box two NBCs and ensure that they were safely loaded into the cargo bay of his delivery robot, while his agents fed the building's security system with footage of an empty lab and empty hallways, making his activities invisible. His delivery robot would cart one box to University Property Disposition and
add it to the outgoing mail there—along with corresponding database records indicating the shipment of a small centrifuge—and the box would be shipped to the Minnesota post office box of one Ivar Svensson. The other would be delivered to his motor home, this second NBC being the one that he planned to upload into. He was okay with the idea of uploading Molly into a remote machine, sending her mental data across the Net via hundreds of network paths, trusting that it would all make it to its destination. But the prospect of sending his own mental snapshot over the Net disturbed him. There was always some remote chance of it being intercepted, and he didn't see any point in running that risk.

  With the NBCs packaged and on their way, he would then head to Anya's to make an unannounced romantic visit. Through the night, his robots would re-map the building, updating his existing maps to reflect displaced chairs, carts, and other miscellaneous equipment. Then, at about 3:30—while Raymond was fast asleep with Anya—his agents would feed the building's security system with his homemade footage of ALA members entering the building, breaking into the lab with high-tech lock-breaker devices, dropping the two NBCs into bags, and smashing the contents of the bags to bits. As the ALA members appeared to depart the building, alarms would be triggered. If all went as planned, police officers and university security personnel would arrive at the building, review the night's footage, and arrest known ALA members for questioning. Meanwhile, his two NBCs would be on their way to Minnesota.

  "Catastrophic failure detected."

  Raymond's racing mind was interrupted by the voice of the controlling computer.

  "Unknown hardware failure. Terminating transfer of neural architecture." Raymond heard Suma gasp next to him.

  "Terminating transfer!" shouted Bob. "Terminating transfer! What the hell is that?"

  The holographic displays showed that the nanoscanners had just finished the nervous scan and were proceeding through the rest of Molly's body, turning it into a deconstructed pudding as they went. But a wall display showing activity in the NBC revealed that flushing patterns had already been released from a million entry points, clearing the NBC of the ostensibly bad data.