Upload

by McClelland, Mark

  "It's flushing!" shouted Bob. "Shit! Raymond, what the hell is going on? The transfer should have carried through! We yanked the flushing procedure ages ago!"

  Raymond stood staring at all the displays of the controlling computer, shaking his head. "I don't know!" he shouted back. "Version control checked out okay. Everything should be just like the Bento scan."

  "And there's nothing we can do, is there?"

  "No," said Anya. "Once flushing patterns have been released into the NBC, there's no stopping them."

  "Well I'll be damned."

  They stood and watched helplessly as Molly's hairy body started to shimmer with motion. Her skin tone faded to gray in splotches, the splotches expanding and joining until what was left on the scanning table looked like a sagging pudding, roughly chimp-shaped, covered with loose hair.

  The holographic displays vanished. Bob rolled the gurney up to the scanning table, aligning it such that it snapped into place, and slid the table surface out of the scanner, back onto the gurney. The sludge-like remains of Molly's body jiggled with the motion and melted out of shape.

  "Poor girl," said Bob. "That's not how it was supposed to work."

  He started to head out of the scanning room, then stopped, whirling about angrily. "Get what's left of her out of here. Whatever failed, I want it fixed or replaced within 48 hours. And Raymond, goddamn it, I want to know just how it is that the flushing procedure is still in place. I made it very clear, a long time ago, that we were to salvage as much of a failed upload as possible. This is unacceptable. Near as I could tell, the scan was finished when that failure occurred. One of you damned programmers may be responsible for the death of that chimp." He pointed at Molly's remains. "That poor goddamned chimp." His voice started to break. He stormed off, but turned again at the door. "And not one word of this gets out of this lab—understood?"

  Everyone present looked to each other as the door closed behind Bob. Raymond noticed that his wrist relay had stopped pulsing. A green light on its display indicated that storage of Molly's mind capture had completed successfully. He let out a big sigh. The thing had been carried off. He glanced at Anya and their eyes met. Before he knew it, the hint of a smile had leaked over his lips. What sort of villainy would she imagine if she were to see him smile at such a moment, not knowing what he knew? He looked down at the controls in front of him, then abruptly turned and walked out of the room, without so much as a look at Suma, hoping that Anya had overlooked his brief expression of victory.

  Raymond found himself nearly racing to get to his office, to privacy. He wanted to explode—he had carried if off! But control was of the utmost importance now. More than ever. What would he say if Anya questioned that smirk? Perhaps he should bring it up to her, to explain, rather than wait for her to question him.

  Back in his office, he paged her, requesting a voice connection. She did not respond immediately. She was probably still in the scanning lab, cleaning up, maybe talking to others about the catastrophic failure. Perhaps he was being blamed. Of course he would be blamed—nobody else would associate their own activities with possible failure, as nobody else had been near the flushing code in over a month. Blame aside, it was natural that his teammates would suspect him of being responsible. He was the one closest to the problem. Whatever others thought of him, Raymond was certain his case was bulletproof. Nobody would be able to detect his handiwork with the version control software. The error would ultimately be attributed to some rare flaw in the complexity of the software. He couldn't linger on this. He needed to move on to his plans for the evening; he needed to monitor the departures of his teammates, making sure that the coast was clear for his late-night activities.

  "Raymond?"

  It was Anya. She was initiating a voice-video connection. Raymond responded.

  "Oh my god, you were so right," he said.

  "Right? Are you okay? I felt like you were on a completely different wavelength in the lab. Right about what?"

  "Right about the risks of uploading. Remember we were talking about uploading?" Judging from the screwed up face Anya was making, she still wasn't quite following. "It's just that you were saying the risks are still too great—that you don't really even think about it, because you have so much to lose. I don't know. I guess that conversation was just fresh on my mind. I thought you were probably thinking the same thing."

  "Not exactly. Raymond, what the hell happened there? I just can't believe the flushing patterns kicked in."

  "I don't know. I'm looking into it. I've seen version control go haywire before. Somehow, old code crept into the latest build. It must have been in the Bento code, too—but it wasn't triggered, because the scan went smoothly. I'm going to run a version control audit, to see what happened."

  "Oh my god, I can't believe this. Molly. I can't believe—poor, poor Molly." Anya's voice was cracking. "You know, there's a chance she could have been cured? She shouldn't have even been in that lab."

  "What?"

  "She could have been cured. With gene therapy, with something. I don't remember. I just remember reading through her files, being surprised that the Lansing Zoo gave up on her."

  "You've said that about other test animals, too."

  "I guess."

  "Zoos can only afford so much. Even if there were other options, uploading may have been the most reasonable."

  "Maybe. I'm not so sure. Listen, a bunch of us are going to go to Central Campus, probably to the Customs House. There's no way we can just go back to work. You can come if you want."

  "No, I need to look into this. Bob's going to be all over me. I need to figure out what happened. I think I'm going to check into my v-chamber for the night, work on this in total solitude."

  "Okay, but don't stay up all night. You can always stop by my place if you want."

  "Thanks, Anya. I was hoping you'd say that."

  "Yeah, but I'll probably come in tomorrow and find you asleep in your v-chamber. I'm gonna run. Good luck."

  "Thanks. Hey, can you tell Suma that I need to work alone on this? At least for a while."

  "Sure."

  o-------------------------------o

  Raymond launched himself into the kick-practice bag in the corner of his office. He was dying to load Molly's mental data into an NBC, to see if his capture of the scan was clean. He wanted the evening to be over. He whaled on the bag.

  "Discipline," he said to himself. "Think."

  He sat down at a terminal and banged out instructions to Scorpio to monitor activity throughout the lab and to let him know when it emptied out. He also instructed Scorpio to check in with him at 9:00 if anyone was left at that time, in which case Raymond would have to alter his plans. He then started to run an inventory of all the procedures necessary for the evening to go smoothly.

  His wrist relay vibrated, indicating that Scorpio was trying to get in touch with him. Raymond put on his light helmet terminal and his hands slipped into his manuhaptic gloves.

  "Mosby, Murray has left you a voice message. Play or summarize?"

  "Play it."

  The voice of a middle-aged man came on. Raymond immediately noticed a slight Chicago accent.

  "Mr. Quan, this is Arnold Murray, private investigator. I'm calling in regards to events that took place several years ago. Involving a Mr. Tate. I'd like to meet with you, to ask you a few questions—it seems you were the last person to make direct contact with him, and some of his relations are concerned about the nature of his departure. If you could get together tomorrow, that would be great. I understand you work... at the university. I'd be happy to meet you at your convenience. Over lunch, if that works for you. Give me a call."

  Raymond took a deep breath, then let out a long sigh. He took his helmet off. "Shit." A face-to-face meeting? He dreaded the prospect. He would have to prepare...

  Or would he? Years had passed. Raymond could claim to have forgotten a lot of what happened. Murray couldn't expect him to have details of all that had happened. In
fact, too much preparation might make him seem nervous. Murray couldn't probe too deeply, under the circumstances. He would have questions for Raymond, and might ask him to provide details in follow-up meetings. What would Murray ask? What could he hope to gain face-to-face? More than information about the past, he would probably be looking for an impression of Raymond's personality. The thing Raymond had to think through was his own story, as he had presented it in the past. He didn't want to think about his past. He needed to focus on his work for Bob and on his plans for the night. But he knew that soon he would have to push through and work out the details of his story. The longer he could stall the investigation, the better; he couldn't afford to make a stupid mistake.

  Chapter 8

  That evening, Raymond worked in his office mini-v. He sat in a Scandinavian recliner, working away, his hands in his lap, his legs extended in front of him. His hands moved as if he wore manuhaptic gloves, giving instructions to the computer, but in this v-space gloves weren't necessary—his movements could be sensed without gloves, and the air around his fingers felt viscous, providing subtle feedback to his gestures. His eyes were closed, his retinal implants providing him with a view of his data world. Occasionally, he spoke, giving the computer verbal commands where it was faster than signing. Generally, he avoided speech commands, because of the risk of being overheard. But within his v-chamber, with nearly everyone gone from the lab, he occasionally allowed himself this luxury. He dictated headings for the report he was finishing up.

  All around him, lost on him while he had his eyes closed, was a beautiful wilderness view. This was Raymond's favorite workplace, a mountain-top viewing station at the crest of Mount Golgora, in the Faralon Range, a hundred miles or so south of Nurania's equator. He was in the center of a small, circular room, surrounded on all sides by glass. The red cedar beams of the roof rose to a point above him. It was an architecture feasible only in a v-world, the roof resting directly on the windows. Outside, clouds passed by at eye level. A landscape of lush valleys sprawled in all directions from the base of the mountain, lustrous red rivers threading their way through rich green foliage.

  His hands lay dormant for a while. Eyelids closed, he stared at his work, exhausted. He had put together an initial report on the state of the lab's version control software, based on an audit of the last six months, covering all software modules related to the flushing code. Having completed some additional file system handiwork, he could now support that the flushing sequence had been absent on the Monday evening prior to Bento's scan, and that it was suddenly present at 12:03 AM Tuesday, the next day, with no record of anyone having committed a change. He would point to overnight maintenance as a possible source of the oddness. And, thanks to support-forum complaints from the past few months, which he had posted himself under false names, he could now point to reports of similar behavior experienced by other users of the same software. Only a highly-qualified security expert would have any chance of tracing his modifications to version control, and even then Raymond felt that he stood a good chance of escaping the tracker's eye. All that could ultimately be proven, he believed, was that the operating systems of the lab's computers had been tampered with—a measure that Raymond had taken long ago, to circumvent some of the defensive measures of the self-aware operating systems in use at the lab. Even then, it would be impossible to determine who had carried out these low-level security breaches, as he had logged on using a shared administrative account to perform them.

  Through the blur of mental exhaustion, he suddenly realized that he had been hearing a tapping sound for some time. Opening his eyes to see what was making the glassy tap-tap-tap sound, he saw a blue jay. It struck him as a familiar bird, but he couldn't think why. He stared at it for a moment, watching with puzzlement as it looked at him and tapped again, this time with slower, larger, more deliberate head motions. Then it dawned on him—it was Scorpio. Raymond had long ago restricted Scorpio's access to the mountain-top office, to reduce interruptions. As a bird, about his only means of interrupting Raymond was by pecking at the window.

  "Oh shit. Scorpio! The next time I come here, remind me to make your interrupt a little more conspicuous. What's up?"

  "Bob has not yet left the building," came Scorpio's voice from overhead.

  "What time is it?"

  "9:03 PM. You asked me to let you know if Bob had not left by 9:00 PM. I executed my interrupt for 187 seconds before gaining your attention."

  "Is anyone else in the lab?"

  "Aside from yourself, Bob is the only person in the lab."

  "What is he doing?"

  "He is working on a text document. It appears to be a press statement about the failed upload experiment on Molly."

  "Right. I guess I'm not the only one working late."

  Raymond made a quick hand gesture, as if turning off a faucet somewhere in front of him, and the simulation ended. Amber lights came on in the v-chamber, he stood up, his chair vanished beneath him, and the haze of nanomist dissipated into the v-chamber walls. He exited the small chamber, crossed to his office chair, donned his light helmet, and slipped his hands into his manuhaptic gloves again.

  Raymond looked through the press statement that Bob was working on. It appeared to be complete. He checked the last-modified timestamp on the document; it had not been touched for over fifteen minutes. Bob was probably staring at it, digesting the catastrophe that had befallen his project. Raymond checked for other recently accessed documents. He found a voice message that Bob had sent to a man named Stewart Richardson at 7:45. Skimming through it, Raymond found it to be a dinner cancellation, apparently with a friend.

  "Who is this Stewart Richardson?" he asked Scorpio.

  "Undergraduate professor of computer science, here at Michigan. Computer vision specialist."

  In the voice message, Bob had made no mention of the afternoon's disaster. Raymond guessed that this Richardson couldn't be a very close friend—Bob was a man inclined toward sharing the details of his life.

  "Nothing interesting," said Raymond, mostly to himself. "He's just staying late, shifting balance after a heavy blow."

  "Instructions?" asked Scorpio.

  "Postpone all events in the schedule by ten minutes for now. Signal me twenty minutes before event number one."

  Event number one was the duping of the lab's internal and external surveillance systems to make it look like Raymond had taken his bike from the bike storage room and left the building, leaving the lab empty. He didn't want it to seem like he stayed especially late, and he didn't want his real facial expression to be captured on his way out of the building—he was afraid of how nervous he might look.

  "What's the weather like?" asked Raymond.

  "Clear, forty-two degrees Fahrenheit."

  "Good." Raymond had prepared clear-weather footage of him leaving the building and was glad he would not have to take the risk of adding weather effects.

  Raymond kicked back and started thinking about what he should do. He wanted Bob out of the building, out of the picture. He figured he could wait Bob out, drive him out, or entice him out. Waiting him out was the most desirable option, of course, but Raymond had to come up with one or more backup plans in case Bob didn't leave. The least risky would be to postpone the entire operation until another evening, but Raymond was anxious to get Molly's mental capture data uploaded into an NBC—his own upload hinged on the success of this crucial step, and he was all too aware of how little time lay between now and his last day on the team. The possibility of postponing the entire upload plan crossed his mind—postponing it until after he was gone from the team—but he had already concluded that being distant from the research team would cripple his efforts; he needed to know where everything stood so he could deal with known risks, and he needed the security advantages of being an insider. So, between driving Bob out and enticing him to leave, which was the better option? Raymond started listing out his options, using finger motions in his manuhaptic gloves to create two column
s of choices.

  "Let me know if he goes," he instructed Scorpio.

  Raymond filled Column A with driving-out choices: simulate climate control problem to make it uncomfortable to remain in his office; simulate system or application failure, to prevent him from completing his work on his own workstation; kill the lights in his office; simulate a network security breach and have Janet issue a warning that any sensitive documents should be closed; have Janet start reading off random news reports at high volume, to irritate him and cause him to doubt the stability of the systems. He filled Column B with enticing-out choices: simulate a call from Bob's girlfriend, asking him to come over (not good, because he would almost certainly find out that she had not actually called); simulate a text message from Bob's home security system, informing him of a prowler (similarly bad); display subliminal messages via Bob's workstation to make him hungry, in the hope that he would go home for dinner; have Janet recommend to him that he go home and continue his work after a good night's sleep.

  All sorts of other goofy ideas floated through his head, but only these made the list. Of these, he thought the options involving Janet were most reasonable. He could have her go haywire, then suddenly issue an alert of a network security breach; this would add to the overall sense of chaos in the computer systems, and—after tonight's simulated attack by the ALA—it would seem to Bob to fall in place perfectly. He would conclude that the network security breach had resulted in outsiders gaining access to his press statement, which had then led to immediate action on their part.

  "I wish I'd planned it this way all along."

  Raymond set about hacking into Janet's control system. It was a trivial hack, taking advantage of several backdoors he had opened over the past year. The key, as usual, was to cover his tracks, and he had long ago figured out how to move unseen through the lab's systems. Within a matter of minutes he had hijacked one of her subprocesses and had her loudly broadcasting excerpts from an environmentalist news feed, her voice booming throughout the building.